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Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Phone Catches Fire on Southwest Plane (theverge.com)
After learning about faulty battery issues in its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, Samsung said it will offer its existing customers a safe, replacement unit. It appears the replacement unit also suffers from the same issue. Jordan Golson, reporting for The Verge: Southwest Airlines flight 944 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate because of a smoking Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. All passengers and crew exited the plane via the main cabin door and no injuries were reported, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson told The Verge. More worryingly, the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier today and he confirmed that he had picked up the new phone at an AT&T store on September 21st. A photograph of the box shows the black square symbol that indicates a replacement Note 7 and Green said it had a green battery icon.A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines said, "prior to the Southwest Airlines Flight 994 departing from Louisville for Baltimore, a customer reported smoke emitting from an electronic device. All customers and crew deplaned safely via the main cabin door. Customers will be accommodated on other Southwest flights to their final destinations. Safety is always our top priority at Southwest and we encourage our customers to comply with the FAA Pack Safe Guidelines."
just put it out with one of the snakes.
Table-ized A.I.
Samsung marketing must be on fire after every US airline on every flight asks passengers to put away their Galaxies. You couldn't possibly increase brand awareness and establish lasting image more than that.
on commercial aircraft!
Or at least it is a good argument for removable batteries... Think of one of these in checked baggage!
that'd be too easy and not nearly disruptive enough. You must be new to air travel in the united states.
Stresses the battery, which reacts differently due to the reduced cabin pressure at higher elevation.
Basic physics. Or at least it was during my Engineering Physics courses this year.
From TFS:
Southwest Airlines flight 944 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate ...
Basic reading. Spend more time in those classes. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Try to envision a world in which the FAA would write a regulation including the phrase "but if it's just a SMALL fire, then heck, just toss it out the door and carry on".
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
I remember a story about a guy that had his ipod fall into the airplane toilet and they deplaned and went to interrogating people.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
do people have cameras ready, and immediately photograph something that caught fire, and the box it came in which was curiously brought along on the flight, for immediate publishing on the Internet? It seems as if the whole idea was to create even more bad press for the biggest foreign competitor in the U.S. phone market.
You must be new here. Everywhere I've gone in the past couple of years there have been cell phone cameras out and recording for anything remotely out of the ordinary and usually for perfectly mundane events (getting on a plane). The odds of any event in the US (and probably Europe and most parts of Asia) being photographed and / or videoed is getting awfully close to 1 these days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
As most smartphone batteries can handle that, I suspect problem with the design itself (like battery-unfriendly power regulators or the battery being heated-up by some other device close to it or a general departure from best-practices observed so far) and, and that is what makes this pretty bad, faulty issue identification. It may just be that the batteries are, in principle, fine. Or that the replacement-batteries have the same issue. Or, as you suspect, a mismatch between the battery and its use, and inadequate testing to compound the error.
It may, of course, be also be a decision by "managers" to ignore concerns of engineers and to push this thing, and then the replacements, out the door fast.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The phone was putting out a goodly amount of smoke, the smell of which would have to be professionally cleaned from the whole plane or most of the people in the SEALED CABIN would have gotten really sick from it.
Not to mention the carpet AND subfloor were charred, further contributing to residual smell and smoke.
Also how exactly would *you* have chucked it out the "door" - the emergency door which means the plane is not flying anywhere anyway? What door exactly????
What no-one ever told you is the magic smoke is also toxic...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The smoke is potentially pretty toxic, the device gets extremely hot (cannot be handled without high-temp gloves) and you cannot put out a lithium fire. You have to let it burn, maybe put sand on it. Hence removing it without making the problem worse is tricky. On the other hand, you can get the passengers out fast (airplanes are designed for that) and that will put everyone in a safe situation reliably. Hence the decision to evacuate is the only right choice here.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If Steve Ballmer were Samsung CEO, he would have personally ripped each and every airline seat out and thrown every last one of them at the customer with the smoking phone.
Please. That 737-700 probably was only $50m or $60m. They could have risked it.
That must have created quite the shit storm.
"But we fired the whole QA department last year and saved a bunch of money. You were happy at the time, boss... remember?"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If only the battery were replaceable, without needing to take apart the whole phone to replace it... it would have cost Samsung a lot less to replace just the battery instead of the whole phone. Too bad.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I guess it makes sense to those narcissistic types ;-)
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd have seen the part where it said "Green said that he had powered down the phone as requested by the flight crew." Flight crews don't ask you to power down your phone after the flight is over.
Toxic gas gets released in a closed environment, a fire starts on a plane, and you think it's abnormal that the smoke be cleared out before a 100 million dollar plane and hundreds of lives are risked?
Nice anecdote grandpa. Since your time, we invented this idea of "statistics" and "collecting data". Fact is, more than 6,000 kids died in the eight years before lawn darts were banned. Now, is it worth banning just to save 763 lives a year? That's a judgement call. But it's not "this activity is perfectly safe, overreaching 'crats." Fun sidenote, apparently the most common cause of injury wasn't among the contestants, but because someone overthrew it into someone else's yard.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Overreaction is a key component
I set a fire in the backseat of your car, I dare you to drive ten more miles without "overreacting" to the smoke filling the car and getting out...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not really interested in Samsung phones - I've always thought them thoroughly lacking in some important areas (design, UI) - but I have to say this whole batteries-on-fire thing is some spectacular PR disaster for the only true competitor to Apples iPhone line.
Kinda makes me feel sorry for this company. AFAIHH the entire nation of South Korea is suffering with them.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If they were real lucky, they could have tossed it out and hit a refueling truck. With any luck they would have gotten enough of a fire going to knock out a couple of planes and maybe destroy a terminal wing in the process.
I do kind of wonder if maybe planes shouldn't have a containment vessel on the plane, some kind of portable cylinder that something dangerous could be thrown into that could be sealed tight.
I don't know what you'd make it out of, maybe some kind of steel cylinder with a ceramic liner. It'd probably be nice if it could be made explosion resistant to something like hand grenade levels to boot.
Such a world would be... business as usual:
They would create an entire new government entity: Federal Aviation Fire Administration or FAFA; to define the exact definition of a federal fire, it's acceptable heat limits for a given altitude, create the Approved Combustible Items List (ACIL), nominate a new cabinet level position, and double the budget for the FAA to allow for US Phone Marshals to be on all flights.
you cannot put out a lithium fire
You're wrong. The FAA produced a video showing several methods of extinguishing lithium battery fires ranked in order of effectiveness using the things available onboard the aircraft.
If Jobs were still around and Apple CEO, he'd have gloated, "Serves you right for stealing our ideas."
I thought he left after turning a somewhat okay software company into a phone and data mining company
Well, this is what happens when you take safety very, very seriously. You don't leave any room for judgment on the people in the field. The rules probably say: in case of fire, EVACUATE THE PLANE. They don't say, in case of fire, check to see whether it's a sufficiently big one and then evacuate the plane, although that does accord better with common sense.
You could do the common sense thing and tell the crew, "use your best judgment". But if you're smart you have your actuaries look over the relative costs of (a) the eventually inevitable occurrence of one individual making a bone-headedly bad decision with hundreds of lives in the balance and (b) the cost of a the unnecessary evacuations a simple-to-follow but inflexible rule causes.
The difference between making a decision for an individual event and weighing the net impact of many such decisions is behind a lot of the incomprehensible annoyances we put up with in modern life.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The problem is they don't make 'em like they used to.
You see, older model Adult Replacement Units (sometimes called children), were made in the good old US of A, and were more durable thanks to the efforts of hard working, patriotic, flag waving union workers. These models were able to tolerate lower levels of caution without voiding the warranty. The new models being constructed today are all imported, cheaply made and have limited warranties. Greater caution is required with these updated units. It's comparable to mobile phones: old brick phones were nearly indestructible, nowadays, newfangled smarty-pants phones need helmets to protect there sensitive innards.
Like I said, the new models just aren't as good as they used to be. ;)
Apple told me that Ballmer was not throwing the chairs right.
It's a matter of quality experience over quantity.
Nice anecdote grandpa. Since your time, we invented this idea of "statistics" and "collecting data". Fact is, more than 6,000 kids died in the eight years before lawn darts were banned. Now, is it worth banning just to save 763 lives a year? That's a judgement call. But it's not "this activity is perfectly safe, overreaching 'crats." Fun sidenote, apparently the most common cause of injury wasn't among the contestants, but because someone overthrew it into someone else's yard.
Well I'm 44 now... imma assume you're 24 and everything going on today looks normal and peachy to you. But in 20 years when you're my age you're gonna look around in disgust and say "WTF happened, things used to be so much better when I was young"
Joke's on him, as airplane travel is one of the times I need both the headphone jack and charge port at the same time. When you have nothing better to do but play with your phone and listen to music for several hours straight, you're going to need to charge.
I vaguely recall a Samsung ad about how useful replaceable batteries are in that scenario as well, but they seem to have forgotten about that...
Joke's on you mindless AC. Do some research first, next time.
Here's One of the MANY options for wireless charging while headphoning with standard headphones for Lightning-equipped devices. Here's another one for $11 (I'm sure it's not MFi-certified like the Belkin is; but hey...).
Oh, and that search took 1 second on Google, and 2 seconds and one scroll-wheel-flick on Amazon.
Hatetard.
Fact is, more than 6,000 kids died in the eight years before lawn darts were banned.
Numbers like those would have raised much greater societal outrage, not to mention media coverage. Googling for the real numbers shows that 6100 people of all ages went to the hospital due to lawn dart injuries during those eight years. About three-quarters of those people were kids, and of those there were 3 deaths. That's still a huge concern, but nowhere near thousands of deaths.
We all know there's workarounds, but they're clunky. It's annoying that my iPhone 7 is more cumbersome to do the things just worked out of the box with my iPhone 6, yes I know I can get bluetooth headphones, which I did but on a long haul flight they don't last and don't work in airplane mode anyway. So now I need another set of headphones and a headphone+charge adapter.
That's not the sort of regression in user experience I'm used to with Apple's products. The other issue with it is the inconsistency, the lightning port isn't available on any Mac so the lightning-only headphones they ship with the iPhone (without any lightning to 3.5mm adapter) don't even work with my other Apple products.
Now I'm sure you'll leap to their defence with all the possible workarounds but the fact is the user experience is now worse, this is a downgrade, not an upgrade and usually Apple handles these things so well so this is disappointing but it's ok it's an annoyance and you can admit that.
never had a cheap chinese battery self-ignite
If Jobs were Samsung CEO, he would have personally thrown somebody out a fricking window over this.
Apple certainly has experience with it. Their exploding laptop batteries date from around 2004 and were still exploding in 2013.
Man that is a long video. The methods are:
- water
- Halon 1211 fire extinguisher alone
Also:
- don't use ice
- don't try and smother it