Forget exploding liquids. The Wall Street Journal has a scary article today (paid reg. required) about laptop batteries catching fire on airplanes. From the opening:
Passengers aboard Lufthansa Flight 435 at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on May 15 were settling in for the nine-hour haul to Munich, Germany, when a burning odor floated into the first-class cabin. According to witnesses, the luggage bin above seat 2A was burping smoke.
Flight attendants evacuated first class just before a computer case in the compartment began to spit fire. The crew grabbed extinguishers and sprayed the bin. Someone swung open a cabin door, snatched the case and tossed it onto the ramp. The case erupted in flames. As passengers watched, fire trucks — then the bomb squad — roared to the scene and put out the blaze. But they found no terrorist device. Instead, authorities discovered a charred laptop computer and a six-pack of melted lithium-ion batteries. [Laptop Fire Graphic]
Long before last week’s foiled plot to blow up airlines using material secreted in carry-on luggage, a growing number of transportation and product-safety officials had expressed concerns that batteries in laptops and other electronics pose a serious risk to airplanes — for reasons completely unrelated to global terror.
The FAA has logged only 60 incidents like this since 1991, the article says, so the risk seems very small. But it also seems to be growing given the greater use of lithium-ion batteries.
The current restrictions out of Heathrow have many wondering how they’ll survive long flights without their laptops. And while those restrictions seems likely to go away in the short-term, what if someone comes up with a way to purposely generate the thermal runaway that the article talks about:
The problem, experts say, is “thermal runaway” — a chemical reaction inside a battery cell that generates intense heat so rapidly that it flares out of control. Most of the failures are traced to a short circuit in the cell or the wires that connect the cell to contact points on the battery pack. Richard L. Stern, associate director of compliance at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, says tiny metal shards can contaminate the battery pack during assembly and later pierce the insulation separating the positive and negative terminals. The opposite poles touch and create an electrical spark. A defective or damaged battery that is vigorously jostled — like a laptop rattling around in a luggage compartment — can trigger a flare.
Stuff like that makes you think laptops as we know them may be going away. Maybe we’ll only be able to use laptops that are approved and rented to us, as Jeff Jarvis is suggesting. Or maybe we’ll only be able to run laptops with batteries removed and off the power-ports airlines provide. Maybe solid-state laptops using standard batteries will emerge.
By the way, the article talks about a UPS plane that was destroyed earlier this year when a load of batteries seems to have caught fire. Coincidentally, I was just on an air safety site with pretty dramatic pictures of the gutted plane yesterday.
I’d come across the site when trying to find out if there’s any place that lists near-misses at airports. I wanted to learn more about the aborted landing my plane had to make when I came into Heathrow this weekend.
That site didn’t come through for me, unfortunately. Nor did some further searches I tried. That made it seem a perfect test for Yahoo Answers, which gets touted as an easy way for others to share knowledge when ordinary web search fails.
So far my question, Info On Aborted Landing At Heathrow?, has only got one answer back from a person who simply wanted points, not to help. I bet Gary Price will know the right database out there. Gary, expect me to IM you!
