US Bans Electronic Cigarettes From Checked Baggage Over Fire Risks (foxnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, the FDA announced it would regulate electronic cigarettes and other new tobacco products. Now, the U.S. Transportation Department announced it is permanently banning passengers and crew members from carrying electronic cigarettes in checked baggage or charging the devices onboard aircraft. They have cited a number of recent incidents that show the devices can catch fire during flight. Passengers can still carry e-cigarettes in their carry-on baggage or on their person, they just can't use the devices on flights. "Fire hazards in flight are particularly dangerous," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement. "Banning e-cigarettes from checked bags is a prudent and important safety measure." The new rule covers e-cigarettes, e-cigars, e-pipes, and battery-powered portable electronic smoking devices in general. It does not prohibit passengers from transporting other battery-powered devices for personal use like laptop computers or cellphones.

Comments

Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[OzPeter]

Exploding vaporizer rips hole in man's tongue

Re: Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is, yes, this type of thing can happen, but it is easily preventable by being careful about marrying your batteries and not using a low resistance coil at high wattages (to prevent drawing too many amps from being pulled from the battery). There are simple calculators you can use online if you can't be assed with learning Ohm's Law, too. No excuse for stupidity.

Also, stay away from so-called mechanical mods unless you know what you're doing (in mech mods, the activation button physically completes the circuit between the battery and the coil instead of using a circuit board to control it all).

Re:Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap batteries explode when charged improperly, news at 11.

Re: Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[OzPeter]

No excuse for stupidity.

If the TSA could screen for stupidity, then there wouldn't be a TSA in the first place.

Unfortunately for the rest of us there is no test to keep stupid people from flying.

Re: Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[Ossifer]

If the TSA could screen for stupidity, then there wouldn't be...

... anyone to bring these devices onto the plane.

Re:Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[hairyfeet]

If a moron built his own 22 pistol and it blew up in his face....would you blame firearms?

Because that is EXACTLY what this fucknuts did, he bought a VERY expensive and VERY specialized MECHANICAL MOD. For those that do not know a "mech mod" is a very specialized piece of kit really only used by a handful that consider themselves "pro vapors" as it has NO protection or overload circuits, its just a battery and a trigger. this means you HAVE TO know Ohms law like the back of your hand, know the battery output down to the .0 wattage, I know guys that have been vaping a decade that won't touch mech mods because of how much time you have to invest in them to keep them from being seriously dangerous....can we ALL guess where this is going?

If you said "rich dipshit with more money than brains and who doesn't know Ohm's law from a seatbelt law buys a $300+ mech mod, throws a $20 gas station top on it and blows his dumbass up"? Then you win a cookie. I mean for fuck's sake guys, we've seen morons take a glock and promptly shoot themselves in the foot, hell I've even seen video of a future Darwin award winner that has a fucking 110v POWER STRIP floating on a donut in a pool to power a portable TV...do we blame these objects for the fucking idiots that don't know how to use them properly?

If you buy a normal vaping device, not some crazy mech mod or $5 Chinese special? Then you have absolutely ZERO to worry about as they all have overload and short circuit protection, hell I'm looking at a 40 watter right now I have to take to the local vape shop to get a seal replaced on because the rubber grommet got a teeny tiny bit worn down with all the tanks I've swapped on the thing and just that little bit of wear was enough for the unit to shut down with a "short circuit protection" error code. this is why I have ZERO worries about any of my units blowing up in my face, no matter what tank i throw on it as even the $30 basic box mods have automatic adjustment for ohms and will not allow the unit to fire if you put a top on that is too high or too low ohms for it to fire safely.

What we have in the article you cited is no different than a rich dipshit that buys a Kawasaki Ninja was his first bike and promptly fucks himself up or kills himself, he bought the vaping equivalent of a dragster without even knowing where the gas goes in the fucking thing.

Re:Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[dwillden]

IF the socket it's plugged into has a GFI, many homes still don't have those at all, or only have them in the bathrooms and kitchen. And then there are the capacitors in the TV itself.

PP is correct in calling that a Darwin candidate.

Re: Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[Ol Olsoc]

You're an idiot. I use my vape because it's what got me to quit smoking. I've been cigarette free for two years now thanks to it.

The puritans that have given rise to the idiocies like Prohibition and the war on drugs are having nightmares about vaping. Without the cancer causing agents, they have lost their second and third and so on arguments that have allowed them to demonize smokers.

Don't worry though, that won't stop them from making shit up.

Re:Fire hazard? No shit sherlock.

[thegarbz]

No he's not. Electricity takes the path of least resistance through a body. If the power plug fell into the pool the people likely wouldn't notice. In order to get electrocuted the people themselves would need to be between the active source of electricity and the return path it is taking, and the probes would need to be close enough together such that the resistance of the water causes an insignificant enough voltage drop compared to the resistance of the human body.

In something the size of a swimming pool if the current return path is through some metal part of the closest edge of the pool then the cross section of the human body is likely insignificant and may experience a small tingling sensation. If the current return path is through the outlet itself then it would almost impossible to get your body in a position where it can kill you. Even if you did try to get yourself into that position you'll be in pain before you get close enough to dying (there's pools in Japan that offer this sensation via two electric plates that get closer together. The further up the pool you swim the stronger the electrical sensation).

But the best part is this is not a case where you have to take my word for it. Go throw an extension cord into the pool sans GFI, get out your multimeter and put the probes a set distance apart and start measuring the voltage drop. You'll find it almost impossible to measure a voltage drop anywhere short of almost sitcking your probes right into the power outlet.

Or if you don't feel like doing this experiment just jump on Youtube where plenty of people have done it, and then even put their body parts in between the leads, and then even repeated it with salt water.

Yes stupid unlikely things happen, but this is still very unlikely to kill you.

Re:Thank god

[Anonymous Coward]

Better vapetards than actual smokers. As someone with pretty bad asthma, I want to hug every single person that has the decency to get their nic-fix without making me get my albuterol fix.

When will they ban ceramic blades in planes

[Trachman]

Every time I go through the airport in a secured zone, I see shelves stacked with wine, whiskey, beer, vodka, champagne. Every bottle, when broken, is a potential ceramic knife. By the way, a very sharp knife.

Two quarters of 100 proof spirit is very flammable. Whiskey in the bottle is just an expensive Molotov cocktail - lite.

Stupid, short sighted and naive!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come off it, i just recently got off a flight from LA to SYD where another passenger from the same flight had his bag catch fire on the train from the airport. Turns out he had power drills and their batteries in there. How are you going to stop an e-cigarette when people are taking power drills and batteries aboard in checked baggage?

Next we will be leaving laptops, tablets, watches and phones at home too.....

This is already being enforced

[eWarz]

Just an FYI, Philadelphia was enforcing this when i flew out of there a few weeks ago to come home. They asked me specifically about those items prior to letting me check my bags in. Nashville (my hometown) had not started this procedure yet.

I don't get it...

[mark-t]

The story talks about an ecig exploding during *USE*, not while it was unattended... or in luggage on a plane.

Using it on a plane is a non-issue, since I can't remember the last time I was on a plane that allowed smoking at all during the flight.

And in matters of storage, why are batteries for ecigs more dangerous than any other kind of battery?

Re:I don't get it...

[Solandri]

Li-ion and LiMn batteries are already banned from the cargo hold of passenger planes. This seems more to be a case of people not knowing ecigs contained a lithium battery, and blithely packing them in their check-in baggage.

Lithium batteries can suffer a runaway thermal failure when they're punctured or shorted, which can then lead to an explosion and/or fire. While this is more common during use, it can happen while stored if the casing is already damaged and something (like turbulence or something falling on top of it) jostles it further.

Re: I don't get it...

[BlueStrat]

Actually I think you will find that big tobacco does have a hand in this through lobbying. The problem that big tobacco has is that a vaping habit only costs five dollars a month instead of the $100 that they are used to from tobacco smokers. Any regulation of cheap stuff from China is to their advantage, so some home brew short circuited battery explosion is the best news they have had for ages. Banning them from checked luggage is just one step on the road to getting China out of the market and replaced with their own brand approved systems at joke prices. This is about making money out of the dumb-fuck customers just like all modern business is supposed to do.

Pretty much this.

Government and the tobacco industry are co-conspirators in keeping the public smoking tobacco. Like any drug dealer, the government and the tobacco companies are moving to crush anything that might threaten their income and reduce the numbers of people hooked on their poison. There's also a lot of money in the treatment and hospice care industries from smoking-related lung cancer and COPD patients that vaping/e-cigs threaten to reduce.

If those in government really gave a crap whether or not people die and was actually trying to encourage people to stop smoking they'd be promoting vaping vs tobacco smoking. But their priorities are for more power, control, and lobbyist/campaign contributions for reelection, and so what's a few 10s or 100s of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year compared to that?

Strat

Re:The usual idiocy...

[goose-incarnated]

Okay, so thing that can explode/cause a fire is banned from checked baggage, yet the same thing that can explode/cause a fire is allowed in carry-on luggage?!? Seriously, what the fuck? Oh, well, we can't have fires in the cargo space, but inside the cabin? Perfectly fine. Thanks USA, for the usual amount of sense in protecting your citizens.

Ever heard of the Helderberg? Cargo fires grow unnoticed until they consume the plane. Cabin fires are quickly spotted.

Is there any evidence

[silentcoder]

that e-cig batteries are more likely to catch fire than any other rechargeable electronic device ?

Re:Suck it bible babies!

[Ol Olsoc]

Maybe that's part of it. For some I could see it. But in my opinion it is because you asshats won't stop trying to ban nicotine. You've been downright bastards against smokers since I was about 18.

I'm seeing calls for a war on vaping, complete with confications and criminalization, horror storuies about vapers gone mad, and attacking teh childrenz, and how vaping is a gateway drug to crack cocaine and watching The Young Turks on Youtube.

All sarcasm aside, the issue of vaping is a big problem for the puritans, because without the carcinogenics, they don't have much to rail against. And the properties of small amounts of nicotine make for a pretty innocuous but often useful effect on people.