Ready for mass hysteria? Apparently the FAA has acknowledged that aeroplane cargo holds can get hot enough to cause lithium batteries to ignite. And there’s more! There was a large quantity of such batteries on a plane that crashed recently:
The Federal Aviation Administration also acknowledged publicly for the first time Friday that a United Parcel Service 747-400 plane that crashed in Dubai last month killing both pilots was carrying a large quantity of lithium batteries.
Since the early 1990s, there have been dozens of incidents of batteries igniting in flight. But it has not been known what triggered many of the fires.
Now this announcement doesn’t exactly seem like it’s revealing anything novel. After all, batteries come with plenty of warnings regarding the temperature ranges they can tolerate and aeroplane cargo holds have little to no climate control—it makes sense that combining the two isn’t a great idea.
What is fresh and new about this announcement is the potential for an extra huge wave of public hysteria and demands that we leave our batteries off planes. [Chicago Breaking Business via Slashdot]
Image by Allyson Kitts/ShutterStock
David Roth
Sunday, October 10, 2010 at 11:45 PMI am sure you would prefer to become a smoking hole in the ground then be inconvenienced with battery removal.
The fact is there is a real danger transporting multiple batteries in the cargo hold of aircraft. Would you prefer to have a fire erupt?
Greg
Monday, October 11, 2010 at 1:26 AMAustralia Post already bans lithium batteries from the mail (unless they are sent be surface mail within Australia only). It upsets people when they buy cheap mobile phones on eBay from China, and then can’t sent them back when they don’t work. Unless they take the battery out of course.
MJ
Monday, October 11, 2010 at 1:34 PMummm, hasnt all luggage on commercial planes been packed into explosion proof containers for a while now? why not uprate some of these containers with a fire supression system and put all baggage containing laptops and phones into those ones