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Botched Repair Likely Cause of Combusting iPhone After Flight
aesoteric writes "The combustion of an Apple iPhone 4 after a regional flight in Australia was likely caused by a botched repair of the handset by an unauthorized repairer, according to air safety investigators in the U.S. and Australia. A small metal screw had been misplaced in the battery bay of the handset. The screw punctured the battery casing and caused an internal short circuit, making the iPhone emit dense smoke (PDF)."
I sent the following letter to Bruce Schneier last year...
Back in the July 2011, I built a device called the Video Coat.
I then went on a family vacation, which culminated in displaying the coat at the Maker Faire in Detroit. The coat traveled to Detroit packed into a suitcase, and I spent an hour assembling it in the hotel room.
I had to catch a plane just as the Faire was ending, so we quickly piled the family into the car and drove to the airport. I didn't have time to pack the coat back into its suitcase, so I carried it on my lap.
I wore the coat into the airport. Everything was fine until I arrived at the luggage check-in counter and was getting my boarding passes. Then, a Detroit cop walked up and told me that he'd had about 50 phone calls about my coat.
They asked me to please pack it into my checked luggage. I had my boarding passes at this time, so I took the time to sit down and disassemble the coat and pack it into its suitcase.
Then, the TSA had decided that my family (wife and two teenage sons) was special, so they wrote SSSS on all of our boarding passes. They nicely let us cut ahead of all the other passengers so that we could get fully scanned, groped, fondled and molested in time to catch our flight. I was enjoying this whole situation very much, since it was so surreal.
The most surreal part was when they inspected the eight big LiPo batteries that are used to provide power to the video coat. They decided that the batteries were small enough to be allowed on the flight, and they handed all eight of them to me for me to repack into my son's backpack.
The way more ultimately surreal part was a month later, when I was at Burning Man, recharging the batteries one morning. I wasn't paying attention, and I accidentally plugged one battery into another battery instead of plugging it into the charger. There was a brilliant white light as the contacts started arcing against each other. I quickly unplugged the batteries and regained my composure.
Since this battery is designed to provide 100 Amperes continuous current in normal use, one can only imagine what the short-circuit current capability is. The manufacturer doesn't provide any safety fuses or shutoff circuits in the packs. It's safe to assume that two of these batteries plugged into each other would catch fire in about 10 seconds.
Imagine if I had plugged two batteries into each other on an airplane! I had enough incendiary material on hand to start four fine lithium fires on that aircraft, not that I would want to do anything remotely like that. I really don't know what the flight crew would have done about that situation. It definitely would make headlines.
So can you please tell me why you think that the TSA allows incendiary devices to be carried on board, but not bottled water?
Bruce's reply? "Because there was an uncovered liquid plot, but no documented battery plot."
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I simply concur with this. For a wide variety of reasons, the move to make the battery not replaceable was an act of pure selfishness on the part of the designer. I'm not going to blame only Apple for this, but any electronic device maker who is guilty of this behavior. Apple was NOT the first to commit this sin. Among the many things I have owned with a Sony label on them, I owned a Sony Clie' when PalmOS was a fun and useful thing to have. It was a superior device with vivid color, expandable storage using the memory stick and all that. The problem was, however, that the battery would eventually lose its ability to maintain a charge. The expensive device became useless and irreparable. You could send it to Sony, but that's only a good idea if you NEED your data back and never expect to repeat this task in the future... the Clie' was discontinued when people got sick of the non-replaceable battery problem.
Once I learned that lesson, long before the iPhone was considered, I just shook my head when I learned the battery wasn't replaceable by the user. I knew what was coming.