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)."

Comments

Waiting for facts

[Overly Critical Guy]

After reading the snarky comments in the previous story about "holding it wrong", "it's an iPhone so it's a feature", and "ban all phones without removable batteries", it's interesting to see what happens if you wait for investigative facts to come out. But where would be the fun in that? Slashdot's comment section is more about cathartic bashing than insightful commentary. Of course, now we'll see accusations that Apple bribed the ATSB or fake-posts from pretend-battery-engineers telling us how the story is wrong or some other similar silliness...

Re:Waiting for facts

[poptix]

The facts don't really matter, "You're holding it wrong" is still relevant and funny.

Re:Waiting for facts

[Savage-Rabbit]

That's not the worst of it. The real outcome is that TSA will now ban all electronic devices as deadly terrorist weapons.

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/651/

Re:Waiting for facts

[Overly Critical Guy]

Not to worry. They're far too busy feeling up 3-year olds and grannies to do anything about deadly weapons of any sort.

Re:Waiting for facts

[NixieBunny]

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."

Re:Waiting for facts

[m.ducharme]

Just to add a counter-factual point to your anecdote, I recall some time ago being in the market for a music player. the iPods at the time were white, second or third gen I guess, and of course the non-replaceable battery issue was as live then as it seems to be now. So I shopped around, and bought an iRiver. nice player, good capacity, user-serviceable battery.

3 years or so later, when the time came around to replace the battery, I went online to order a replacement only to find that the battery I needed, with a specific shape and plug, had been discontinued, and there was no way I could get a new one, branded or after-market.

Since then, I haven't been fussed about the non-replaceable battery issue, really.

Re:Waiting for facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wait for a law?

There are several federal agencies that can make something effectively illegal simply by editing a list, and publishing it. We had to amend the constitution of make alcohol illegal, but drugs float from schedule to schedule at the whim of the FDA. The ATF, does the same thing. Neither offer, nor will when asked, a shred of evidence behind their reasoning.

Five sided screws

[CmdrPorno]

The report says the shop that performed the repair was not an authorized Apple repair shop, and shows the device as having the old, dangerous standard Philips screws. Now we know why Apple has been so adamant about switching from regular Philips screws to five-sided screws--with the five sided, tamper-resistant screws, there is no chance that an unauthorized repair facility would be able to create an explosive condition by leaving a screw inside the iPhone.

First rule of any tech repair

[macraig]

First rule of any tech repair, 'authorized' or not:

1. Always have a method to account for every screw and part removed!

I'm not authorized to service my own laptops, one of them has been disassembled literally dozens of times, and yet this scenario is very unlikely to happen to me. I have sets of interlocking parts compartments that I have labelled specifically for teardowns of each laptop; the screws are grouped by progressive steps or layers of the teardown, and further by size in some instances. This is critical even for someone performing the same teardown every day, as no one is perfect, but it's especially critical for those first or one-time teardowns.

This screw got misplaced not because the guy was 'unauthorized' but rather because he was careless and foolish. Just because a person is indeed authorized (or degreed) is no exemption from carelessness and foolishness.

battery compartment design

[pinkfalcon]

This also re-opens the argument that if Apple made the battery replaceable in the first place, then you wouldn't have to damage the phone to replace the battery.