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Virgin and Qantas to ban use of portable power banks after string of fires
- AtlasBarfed 10mo agoIsn't LFP dense enough for power banks now? And far more stable/safe? Heck, isn't Sodium Ion getting good enough now?
- hackingonempty 10mo agoLFP is too much nuance, they will just ban "lithium" and that'll be that.
- JumpinJack_Cash 10mo agoMeanwhile you can carry a nuclear bomb on a train and nobody even bothers to check the id or ticket up until you are on board. Irrational fear of flight strikes again, it's a very long list actually of standards that aviation has to comply with in order not to thrive but to merely exist , all because people are irrationally fearful about being suspended mid air. It's the same thing for nuclear
- poemxo 10mo agoMost people don't have nuclear bombs.
- JumpinJack_Cash 10mo agoYes but what I mean is that nobody checks anything
- IAmBroom 10mo agoYou haven't flown in the US in the last 24 years.
- JumpinJack_Cash 10mo agoI meant on train dude, try to follow the discourse
- YokoZar 10mo agoCitation needed
- ash_091 10mo agoA train can go from "cruising speed" to letting passengers off to escape a fire in about a minute. A plane might take anywhere from five minutes to several hours to be able to safely let passengers out. Personally I feel that's a good enough reason to impose more robust restrictions on Things Which May Cause Fire on planes compared to trains. Especially in the case of lithium batteries where they're more or less impossible to extinguish one they're going.
- JumpinJack_Cash 10mo ago[flagged]
- nxm 10mo agoCigarette fires and battery fires are not same in terms of efforts to put them out. Look up electric vehicle fires and what it takes to contain them
- zamadatix 10mo agoI agree with the concept of comparing risk being the meaningful approach, but I disagree this is how you go about measuring risk. How many people are being injured/killed per million km or something is the type of metric. Air travel far exceeds those types of metrics vs other common modes of travel, yet is always the first one to be further focused on how bad it could potentially be.
- appreciatorBus 10mo agoI would argue at the performance of aviation safety, and the constant focus on how bad it could be, is exactly why aviation is safe. The day that we decide to stop focussing on what could go wrong, is the day that aviation stops being safe. For example, if aircraft come within five nautical miles or I think it’s 1000 vertical feet, it’s considered a very serious incident. Not because anyone is in danger at five nautical miles or 1000 vertical feet, but because if you don’t draw the line there, and treat that barrier as seriously as if two aircraft had collided, then there isn’t really a barrier at all.
- Krssst 10mo agoUncontrolled fire in a plane is almost certain death if you don't land within minutes. You cannot land once the fire takes out the cables necessary for flight controls. Airplanes can still operate until landing after various mistreatments but uncontrolled fire is not one of them.
- JumpinJack_Cash 10mo agoWhat are the odds that a lithium battery would cause uncontrolled fire? We are around them daily, ever since the 80s-90s , to this day I have never seen one in person. Look at this guy, he puts a screwdriver through phones for show off on youtube, intentionally damaging the battry...nothing dangerous or uncontrolled happens, the little smoke is the equivalent of a couple of cigarettes. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gcjfJfbOVkY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gcjfJfbOVkY And all the psychological tests on pilots, no train or bus pilot has to go through the same stuff even though they have a similar number of souls on board I'll go to my grave claiming that aviation has to fight for its existence on a daily basis by clearing impossible standards because people are scared , intuitively scared of flight as humans aren't supposed to be able to do that and all our ancestors who tried failed miserably by falling off a tree or something. The percentage of people who get the physics of why a plane flies are less than 1% of those who ever flew, and that is not even the majority of the 9 billion humans yet, hell not even a quarter. "If your phone falls through the seats DON'T TRY TO RECOVER IT as the seat (which is fixed) might damage it and cause a fire" lmao Next thing they'd be making announcements on how to seat as a particularly fat individual missing their seat could land on their ass and fall through the fusolage causing a decompression...give me a break
- icehawk 10mo agoNon-zero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6 > The report indicated that the fire was caused by the autoignition of the contents of a cargo pallet that contained more than 81,000 lithium batteries and other combustible materials
- 10mo ago
- cameldrv 10mo agoDid you see in the article that picture of the Air Busan plane from last year? The one without the roof? That incident happened on the ground as they were getting ready for takeoff. If that were the middle of the ocean, those people would all be dead.
- lisbbb 10mo agoDoesn't every cell phone have a highly volatile, made in China battery in it as well? What if they started banning smartphones on flights! Oh the humanity!
- mikestew 10mo agoWhat if, indeed… https://www.skolnik.com/blog/how-airlines-are-enforcing-the-ban-on-the-samsung-galaxy-note-7/ https://www.skolnik.com/blog/how-airlines-are-enforcing-the-...
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Doesn't every cell phone have a highly volatile, made in China battery in it as well? They're smaller, and thus contain less energy, and are typically also less powerful.
- Workaccount2 10mo ago>five in-flight fires involving power banks on Australian or Australian-registered aircraft since 2016. So about one every two years. Better ban everything with a battery before this gets out of control.../s
- ars 10mo agoThe title is misleading unless you read it carefully. They are not banning bringing power banks, they are banning using power banks. On the plane you have to keep the power bank on your person, but not use it. This would be a lot more defensible if they had high-power USB-C ports by every seat.
- appreciatorBus 10mo agoI’m sure you don’t mean this, but it sounds like you’re saying that if airlines don’t provide high-power USB, passengers would prefer the risk of dying in a fire rather than going without their devices. Of course, now that I type that out, I worry that perhaps many people would make exactly that choice. Regardless, I would argue that aviation safety is much more important than device preference - if that means, we all have to go back to paper books, then so be it.
- holysoles 10mo agoI'm pretty certain their intent was that passengers would be less upset by the rule change, and certainly less motivated to try to circumvent/violate them if they had reliable charging ports available
- instagib 10mo ago“Australian airlines will ban the use of portable power banks… and Emirates”
- jerlam 10mo agoChina bans non-certified power banks on their domestic flights, even if they're not in use. And the certification authority is China-specific, they don't care about UL or any others. https://www.travelofchina.com/china-power-bank-ban-2025-xiaomi-3c-travel-guide/ https://www.travelofchina.com/china-power-bank-ban-2025-xiao...
- kenny11 10mo agoI had this happen at the Shenzhen airport a few weeks ago. They confiscated my Apple MagSafe battery because it didn't have the CCC mark. From the looks of it, they were confiscating a lot of them. It was a missed opportunity for someone to not have opened an approved power bank store just past security.
- etempleton 10mo agoIs the issue that many power banks have cheaply made batteries compared to phones, tablets, and laptops? Why power banks specifically? If the issue is quality control is there certification that airlines might require?
- trollbridge 10mo agoBecause the quality control on power banks is absolute rubbish. They're typically bought from no-name vendors on Amazon with zero accountability for if they go bad. Overall, the U.S. and other countries need to start requiring UL listing for stuff like this before it can be imported into the country (and strict liability for any domestic manufacturers).
- joeblubaugh 10mo agoI’ve been getting this message on international flights for the last two months already - no using power banks at any time on the plane. At some point lithium ion battery packs are going to be completely excluded from luggage and it’ll be chaos
- polishdude20 10mo agoI would use a battery pack less if the outlets on the planes actually worked! On my last 4 flights I've had outlets completely disabled.
- jtokoph 10mo agoAnd when they do work, my North American two prong plug falls right out half of the time.
- dylan604 10mo agoThat just sounds like another way of not working. Even if there is power, if the socket doesn’t hold the prongs, it’s not going to power your device.
- trollbridge 10mo agoA trick (on U.S. airlines) is to plug in an overseas adapter (British style plugs seem to work pretty well for this purpose), since those prongs see far less use and still grip well.
- georgefrowny 10mo agoBritish plugs are just better anyway. The rectangular pins have far better contacts mechanically and electrically and they're arranged in a triangle so the plug can't wobble its way out. It's really a very good design.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- hexbin010 10mo agoIndeed! Also: - The outlets have shutters preventing access to the contacts, until the longer earth pin is inserted - The live pins are on the bottom, making contact harder if it's partially pulled out. And the live pins have sleeved sections so even less live metal is exposed. - The cable drop is at 90 degrees, typically causing less pull on the plug
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- musicale 10mo agoAs batteries pack more and more energy into smaller and smaller spaces, what could possibly go wrong?
- jMyles 10mo agoIt's nice when rules can be written in sense instead of blood. I don't know if that's the case here. But any fire on an aircraft is close to the latter.
- Helithumper 10mo agoTitle should be updated to Virgin Australia. The article doesn't reference Virgin Atlantic or any other Virgin brands.
- aetherspawn 10mo agoThe issue is that these power banks are often cheapo corporate gifts or bought out of vending machines, catering to the cheapest possible price and not certified to anything. In this case they have crappy BMS that doesn’t have thermal sensors or even make sure the cells are balanced during charging, and no mechanical integrity so the cell can just get crushed and explode. The solution is to require all consumer electronics with batteries to be certified (if carried on a plane or in the post), and part of that certification process needs to be mechanical; including crushing with normal levels of in-transit forces, and electrical testing; including charging the device at a high temperature.
- burnt-resistor 10mo agoYep. UL & CE certification to standard X. The lack of retail marketplace and manufacturing regulation enforcement are the problems that are fixable similar to lack of safety standards in automobiles in the US prior to 1966. Safety regs are written in blood and so people can winge and whine all they want about headaches, cost, red tape, and paperwork but too bad.
- eternityforest 10mo agoOr better yet, create a new set of replaceable battery standards with multiple chemistry options, and certify the batteries. Users should be able to choose LiFePo4/LTO/Sodium for peace of mind and reliability if they don't need normal lipo levels of capacity.
- aetherspawn 10mo agoIt’s not that simple… the voltages are all different, and each chemistry has different charge and discharge rates, so this just makes the end product insanely complicated and expensive.
- eternityforest 10mo agoWe've already got programmable charging chips that can adapt to different chemistries, and they're already pretty cheap, and USB-C has proven that fancy voltage negotiation protocols can be done cheaply.