Woman's headphones explode mid-flight: 'I felt burning'

Talk about a rude awakening. An Australian woman lived through a terrifying ordeal on a flight from Beijing to Melbourne last month, after waking up to discover her headphones were on fire.

The Associated Press reports that an unidentified woman was sleeping when she woke up to a loud explosion and then felt her face burning. At that point, the plane had been in the air for about two hours.

“I just grabbed my face which caused the headphones to go around my neck,” the woman said in a statement released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. “I continued to feel burning so I grabbed them off and threw them on the floor. They were sparking and had small amounts of fire.”

The fire was quickly extinguished by flight attendants, who poured a bucket of water on the headphones, causing them to melt.

According to one woman, the small blaze affected some other passengers, who were “coughing and choking” for the rest of the flight.

The transport safety agency said it believes the device’s batteries caught on fire, though the brand of the headphones was not identified.