3 ms·

This has nothing to do with the battery. The claim is that they have solid intelligence that someone is trying to fit a bomb inside a laptop/tablet and it would

This has nothing to do with the battery. The claim is that they have solid intelligence that someone is trying to fit a bomb inside a laptop/tablet and it would be hard for screeners to tell the difference between legitimate devices and bombs. However, aviation experts have weighed in and stated that even a full pound of pure explosives detonated in the cabin of a modern airliner is unlikely to bring the plane down. So you could just ban very heavy laptops and leave the rest alone. You know what HAS brought two 747s down in the last decade? Lithium battery fires in the hold. UPS and FedEx no longer permit bulk shipments of L-Ion batteries by air because of the risk. So they want to move devices from the cabin (where if they catch fire someone will notice and they can be dealt with) and put them all together in the hold where fires are harder to detect and impossible to fight! Smart, so smart!

ytpete 9y ago
On top of that, if screeners can't tell the difference between legitimate devices and bombs in a carryon, why would they be able to do any better for checked bags? Bombs in the cargo hold are still bombs. One explanation I'd heard was that checked bag screening areas are more secure, while for carryons a rogue gate employee could wave through a suspicious laptop without any further backup checks... or even a rogue food-service employee could smuggle something in and hand it off to a passenger. But that could happen with any 'container object,' not just laptops. And it's hard to square that a ban expanding to major European airports.