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UK Pilots Want Lithium Battery Powered Devices In the Cabin
AmiMoJo writes: The professional association and trade union of UK pilots The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA), has asked airlines to require travelers to carry devices that run on lithium-based batteries with them in the passenger cabin instead of in checked luggage. The union hoping to address what it considers a significant potential safety risk, baggage fires going unnoticed in the hold. BALPA explains, "when they short circuit, [they] have a tendency to burst into high intensity fires, which are difficult to extinguish." They further point out, "lithium battery fires have caused at least three cargo aircraft crashes and the UN safety regulator has banned a specific type of lithium battery (lithium metal) from being carried as cargo on passenger aircraft."
Now I need TWO bags for my vibrator collection.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is a laudable suggestion with three small caveats, assuming you don't ban our iPhones, laptops all together :-
1/ If we are required to carry these batteries in the cabin then a mass dispensation needs to be made to accommodate them and what they are powering if non-removeable (I've had situations in the past where I needed to check my laptop power supply and batteries to get under the cabin Mass allocation)
2/ TSA etc cannot require that devices be activatable to be carried as a dead battery would mean nowhere else to carry them. (To be honest I nere understood this rule as all previous instances of 'converted' electronic devices used on planes would have passed this test but not the chemical sniffers.)
3/ If they do catch fire in the cabin, what you gonna do in the short period of time before toxic fumes start killing passengers. My suggestion, get an empty food trolley and keep duct-tape on hand.
No. UK pilots want lithium batteries OUT of the cargo hold. They don't have some odd desire to populate the cabin with lithium batteries.
I assume that the problem is with noticing the fire. A small Li-ion battery can self-ignite and burn fairly enthusiastically; but isn't too dangerous if it is prevented from setting anything else on fire. The smoke is noxious and any one directly exposed the the flame will be burned; but it just isn't a very big fire. If the battery is hiding down in the cargo hold in somebody's suitcase, it has a better chance of recruiting all the nearby luggage and getting a proper fire started; at which point suppression becomes more difficult and release of enough energy to actually damage the aircraft becomes likely.
I'd be interested to know what the current standard for fire detection in the cargo area is; and how difficult and costly it would be to achieve better early warning.
Why would you assume that Allah would need to or even want revenge for such a thing? Assuming, for the moment, that Allah is actually opposed to gay marriage, and assuming that said deity even actually cared about what it was that we do, what would be the point of an omniscient and omnipotent being giving humans what is supposedly a free will if said deity was going to be petty and actually try to micromanage human behavior via swift vengeance for every infraction?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'