Irrational fear of flight strikes again, it's a very long list actually of standards that aviation has to comply with in order not to thrive but to merely exist , all because people are irrationally fearful about being suspended mid air.
It's the same thing for nuclear
A plane might take anywhere from five minutes to several hours to be able to safely let passengers out.
Personally I feel that's a good enough reason to impose more robust restrictions on Things Which May Cause Fire on planes compared to trains. Especially in the case of lithium batteries where they're more or less impossible to extinguish one they're going.
For example, if aircraft come within five nautical miles or I think it’s 1000 vertical feet, it’s considered a very serious incident. Not because anyone is in danger at five nautical miles or 1000 vertical feet, but because if you don’t draw the line there, and treat that barrier as seriously as if two aircraft had collided, then there isn’t really a barrier at all.
Depending on courses and speeds that 5nm could go to zero in as little as 16 seconds or so. Airliners are not especially maneuverable.
Yes, the odds of the courses actually intersecting are small, but not zero.
If I want to fly somewhere I already know that once I land there I face a considerable risk when I get in the metropolis. Risk of illness, violence, assault etc. Some metropolis are worse and some are better but the risk is always there.
The plane is the least of my problems.
The monopoly of aircraft production and the fact that planes can be used everywhere in the world is forcing us to withstand the same level of risk tolerance as the U.S. , and not even avg U.S citizen....for obvious reasons due to what happened theatrically some 25 years ago the risk tolerance of aviation is forced to be the same as Billionaire's Row , Central Park West , NYC, NY and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.
On the other hand...trains get to do this and nobody cares because they are local not global:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsN5_NoffsY
The FAA and the FDA are enemies of progress
A rebalancing vis a vis cars, buses, ships and trains is due. All the effort and man hours wasted trying to clear the last 0.01% in aviation would be better spent focusing on the other means of transportation, or other stuff that actually kills people period. The goal is not to die period. Not avoiding dying of aviation crash, and planes are about the last culprit as far as stuff that kills people worldwide on a yearly basis.
They are far behind dogs, actually my intuition says that they are behind a very calm and friendly breed such as German Shepherds, they are calm and friendly alright but as far as dog breeds worldwide for sure they kill > 200 people yearly.
I'd board a 95% plane if it means that once landed I could step on a 95% safe train or bus. Or a 95% safe city for that matter , Instead now the values are:
Plane : 99.9999999% safe
Train: 80% safe depending on the city and amount of crime in subway
Bus : 70% safe again depending on the city and amount of crime
City as a whole: Between crime, 6000 puounds vehicles speeding through the streets etc...I guess much less than 70%
The cognitive dissonance of people living in urban hells where crime is rampant and risk of death from assault , robbery or outright murder and then being afraid of flying tells you all you need to know. And no, it doesn't happen solely in Africa....San Francisco is a good example of that.
Big if true!
Look at this guy, he puts a screwdriver through phones for show off on youtube, intentionally damaging the battry...nothing dangerous or uncontrolled happens, the little smoke is the equivalent of a couple of cigarettes.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gcjfJfbOVkY
And all the psychological tests on pilots, no train or bus pilot has to go through the same stuff even though they have a similar number of souls on board
I'll go to my grave claiming that aviation has to fight for its existence on a daily basis by clearing impossible standards because people are scared , intuitively scared of flight as humans aren't supposed to be able to do that and all our ancestors who tried failed miserably by falling off a tree or something.
The percentage of people who get the physics of why a plane flies are less than 1% of those who ever flew, and that is not even the majority of the 9 billion humans yet, hell not even a quarter.
"If your phone falls through the seats DON'T TRY TO RECOVER IT as the seat (which is fixed) might damage it and cause a fire" lmao
Next thing they'd be making announcements on how to seat as a particularly fat individual missing their seat could land on their ass and fall through the fusolage causing a decompression...give me a break
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6
> The report indicated that the fire was caused by the autoignition of the contents of a cargo pallet that contained more than 81,000 lithium batteries and other combustible materials
Is the blood shed by aviation more red or more special then?
It's not, it's the fact that the whole concept of flight goes against human intuition so it will always feel fishy and unsafe , even though the physics is much sounder and I'd say even safer than all other forms of transportation
This is the same cognitive failure that happens with
Sharks v. Mosquitos and
Nuclear v. Fossil fuels
It seems to me you are defending the cognitive failure instead of arguing for the re-establishment of risk/reward parity also considering the enormous benefits of aviation which enables us to get from one point of the globe to the opposite in less than a day
In fact, new safety regs are often suggested by rail companies, who observe previously-unexpected situations IRL (despite the best attempts to nail these down in advance).
You're enjoying tossing around a lot of "What if"s, out of ignorance, but modern transit safety is not based on some dude sitting around and thinking up rules for funsies. It's a highly intensive engineering process, with multiple layers of cross-checking.
And then millions of us get behind the wheel, and there's nothing anyone can do about decisions made by each of them. Car safety is based on the hope people fear getting tickets, and some soft design aids.
Trains make thousands of victims each year, I think worldwide the number borders the 10,000 from all causes and nobody gets on their case like planes which in a good year make 0 victims per year worldwide
So you have it the other way around, the hypotetical blood is the aviation one and the real blood is the one shed by trains and yet the scare factor is all on planes
https://www.skolnik.com/blog/how-airlines-are-enforcing-the-...
They're smaller, and thus contain less energy, and are typically also less powerful.
So about one every two years. Better ban everything with a battery before this gets out of control.../s
And I'm glad you don't work in risk management.
They are not banning bringing power banks, they are banning using power banks. On the plane you have to keep the power bank on your person, but not use it.
This would be a lot more defensible if they had high-power USB-C ports by every seat.
https://www.travelofchina.com/china-power-bank-ban-2025-xiao...
It was a missed opportunity for someone to not have opened an approved power bank store just past security.
If the issue is quality control is there certification that airlines might require?
Overall, the U.S. and other countries need to start requiring UL listing for stuff like this before it can be imported into the country (and strict liability for any domestic manufacturers).
At some point lithium ion battery packs are going to be completely excluded from luggage and it’ll be chaos
It's really a very good design.
- The outlets have shutters preventing access to the contacts, until the longer earth pin is inserted
- The live pins are on the bottom, making contact harder if it's partially pulled out. And the live pins have sleeved sections so even less live metal is exposed.
- The cable drop is at 90 degrees, typically causing less pull on the plug
https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co...
https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co...
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/mgtv4b/a/40w-dynamic-p... (the clonking sound is extremely satisfying!)
The high watt chargers are heavy regardless
Does that US version even stay in the socket given the weight?
Tbh it's pretty tiny price to pay. And 5 -pack of double sockets costs £13 btw! ($17 ish)
This is where it’s helpful to have a multi-port charger where they’re not all high-draw.
IMO more important to go with something flat or light that won’t fall out under its own weight.
In this case they have crappy BMS that doesn’t have thermal sensors or even make sure the cells are balanced during charging, and no mechanical integrity so the cell can just get crushed and explode.
The solution is to require all consumer electronics with batteries to be certified (if carried on a plane or in the post), and part of that certification process needs to be mechanical; including crushing with normal levels of in-transit forces, and electrical testing; including charging the device at a high temperature.
Users should be able to choose LiFePo4/LTO/Sodium for peace of mind and reliability if they don't need normal lipo levels of capacity.
AtlasBarfed•2mo ago
Heck, isn't Sodium Ion getting good enough now?
hackingonempty•2mo ago