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Airlines and economic politics and terrorism threats aside, letting laptop batteries in airplane cabins at all has to be just the craziest hypocritical lapse in

Airlines and economic politics and terrorism threats aside, letting laptop batteries in airplane cabins at all has to be just the craziest hypocritical lapse in air travel safety ever. The very idea that your personal incendiary device is totes A-OK because it also plays movies seems completely bonkers. It's like a million hyperlocalized somebody-else's-problem fields wrap around portable electronics that we all just collectively ignore. Hell, continue to forget the explosive capacity of these commonplace electronic grenades for a moment. The chemical fumes produced by lithium battery fires are absolutely terrifying. You can quickly vent the storage compartment and nobody even has to know. In the absolute worst case you can dump the luggage and cover losses with insurance. You just can't do the same to the passenger compartment. I want the rules to be fair, and I want the rules to make sense, but damned if I don't find myself more and more wishing it were a complete ban.

thedrbrian 10y ago
People will know if you vent the cargo hold as it shares its atmosphere with the passengers. I'd rather the battery be easily accessible if it catches fire.
JamesLeonis 10y ago
As with any ban, I question if the response is proportional to the threat. Yes we have all these chemical devices with us (hell you're flying on a burning tank of jet fuel, make no mistake), but the actual number of exploding electronics is so low we don't bother thinking about it. Even the Note 7, which was outright banned on flights, had only a couple hundred incidents, in a market that transports millions of phones a day (not to mention other electronics) routinely for _years_. In fact, let's compare apples-to-apples how likely you are to die from some of these things in a given year [1]: * Air accident (any cause): 1 in 767,303 * Traffic accident: 1 in 8,938 * Fall from ladder: 1 in 752,688 In fact, I'm having a hard time finding statistics that indicate passenger consumer electronics are a threat at all. Nearly all plane crashes are some form of human error from the flight crew and mechanical failure. Even the Note 7 didn't bring down planes, despite actually exploding on them several times. Even that ban isn't about the lethality, but the inconvenience and delays suffered because they _must_ check for worse problems. So to reiterate my point: What is the threat you are trying to solve? EDIT: Formatting [1]: http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/mortality-risk http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/mortality-risk

thedrbrian 10y ago

People will know if you vent the cargo hold as it shares its atmosphere with the passengers. I'd rather the battery be easily accessible if it catches fire.

JamesLeonis 10y ago

As with any ban, I question if the response is proportional to the threat. Yes we have all these chemical devices with us (hell you're flying on a burning tank of jet fuel, make no mistake), but the actual number of exploding electronics is so low we don't bother thinking about it. Even the Note 7, which was outright banned on flights, had only a couple hundred incidents, in a market that transports millions of phones a day (not to mention other electronics) routinely for _years_. In fact, let's compare apples-to-apples how likely you are to die from some of these things in a given year [1]: * Air accident (any cause): 1 in 767,303 * Traffic accident: 1 in 8,938 * Fall from ladder: 1 in 752,688 In fact, I'm having a hard time finding statistics that indicate passenger consumer electronics are a threat at all. Nearly all plane crashes are some form of human error from the flight crew and mechanical failure. Even the Note 7 didn't bring down planes, despite actually exploding on them several times. Even that ban isn't about the lethality, but the inconvenience and delays suffered because they _must_ check for worse problems. So to reiterate my point: What is the threat you are trying to solve? EDIT: Formatting [1]: http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/mortality-risk http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/mortality-risk