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.
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
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
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...
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
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.
AtlasBarfed•5h ago
Heck, isn't Sodium Ion getting good enough now?