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I wonder how long these will be allowed to fly after first battery fire if they use lithium chemistry. It is one thing to move burning car around, but passenger
by Ekaros 3y ago
I wonder how long these will be allowed to fly after first battery fire if they use lithium chemistry. It is one thing to move burning car around, but passenger plane on most airports? It could take hours or even days to extinguish one and move to save location. Disturbing the normal operation for the whole time.
So even if there is not loss of life, the disruption of operations could be too significant for many of the bigger airports to allow operation.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoOh the doubts.. anyway I think you can be sure in that industry that this would be considered ahead, and not suddenly realized after the first fire. Curious for reference for that it would take days? There seems to be a lot going on in getting better to put such fires out efficiently (despite the eventual advances in different battery techs also).
- Ekaros 3y agoJust extrapolating from electric cars. If those can flare up after fire has been put out after significant time. I don't see why even larger battery banks on plane would not do exactly the same thing. Solutions with cars is either submerge them in water or cover them with fireproof blankets. But scaling those to larger size is quite a challenge.
- rini17 3y agoPresumably they'll do everything to ensure that fire is localized to small part of a battery. There's much more space to separate them than in car. Maybe we'll even see some mechanism to eject batteries out as last resort, since fire is going to weaken airplane structurally anyway so it's better to do it in controlled manner.
- audunw 3y agoWhat makes you think a battery fire is likely at all? High quality EVs are already extremely unlikely to catch fire. Much less likely than ICE cars of similar model and age. And those cars are exposed to relatively rough conditions (accidents, debris on the road, etc) , and the battery packs aren’t closely monitored. For a plane, the QA of the battery pack would likely be better to begin with. They’d have much stricter procedures for monitoring the battery packs for possible abnormalities. And they’re unlikely to be exposed to a physical accident. By the time they hit the skies (2030+) our experience with batteries will also be better. It’s obviously possible to ensure a battery never spontaneously ignite. Most battery packs, by far, never do. We’ll probably have a better understanding of the triggers of freak spontaneous fires. Even in the ridiculously unlikely event of a battery fire I’m pretty sure it can be handled. People make out EV battery fires to be impossible to handle but the fire departments in places with high EV concentration has it pretty much figured out now and consider EVs to be less problematic than ICE. (Norway, Netherlands)
- Ekaros 3y agoI'm just considering couple hundred of these operating daily. Then if single one has to abort take off and evacuate at end of runway. That might close off relatively big airports runway for good bit. Likely causing significant secondary economic damage. Also ensuring that everything works perfectly and never fails is not very simple thing.
- midasuni 3y agoWhen Ba38 crashed at Heathrow it was blocking the runway end for 3 days
- inferiorhuman 3y agoWhat makes you think a battery fire is likely at all? I'm half kidding, but Boeing's experience with the 787. Their solution was more or less to just seal the battery off a bit better.