Aircraft seat crushed mobile phone battery, caused a fire on passenger plane | Hacker News Reader

Aircraft seat crushed mobile phone battery, caused a fire on passenger plane

avsax.com

41 pointswalterbell59 comments

That’s why when I fly I now hear an announcement: “if you lose your phone down your seat, please do not attempt to recline or unrecline it. Ask a crew member for help.”

As per the article, "this safety message is recommended by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency".

This is an advertorial for AvSax fire containment bags. I don't mind that -- they seem like useful things to have around in general, and especially on an aircraft. However, I do have to wonder why the marketing team chose to promote their product by highlighting a real-life incident in which a fire containment bag would have been no help at all!

Having seen a few lithium battery fires, I am very dubious that it would be possible to safely get the phone into the bag while it's burning.

The bag is probably a good option for charging a suspect battery inside of, especially when unattended.

However, if a battery is already on fire, then a fire extinguisher is clearly the best bet. Only when the fire is out and the battery cold, should the bag be used (in case of re-ignition).

I thought the point was the post incident phone could have been placed in the bag in case of flare up, rather than require an attendant with an extinguisher?

As a principle, sure, makes sense. But why choose a specific illustration where

> The red phone was hopelessly jammed in the mechanism.

and

> The phone was eventually removed by the fire service when the plane landed.

Just advertising phone fires in general probably gets people to buy these bags...

> They pulled the seat padding back and saw a mobile phone trapped in the seat mechanism and doused the phone with several bursts from a dry powder fire extinguisher as they feared using water could cause further problems as the seat’s mechanism was electrically-powered.

We are nearly at the time when it is time to start recommending using water on electrical fires.

It used to be a bad idea due to the risk of electrical shock - water can be conductive, and you might get an electric shock while dousing water on a fire involving live electronics.

However, things have changed. Most residential buildings (at least in europe) have every circuit protected by an RCD, meaning that adding water will cause the circuit to automatically switch off (good!).

Flames are also decent conductors, so most electrical things on fire will already have their circuit tripped when you find them.

And finally, low voltage systems (battery powered devices) generally don't have enough volts to cause any harm anyway. Electric cars will generally auto-disable any high voltage circuits when fire is detected.

Water fire extinguishers are safer to use around people (non-toxic) and on people (puts out burning clothes), and better for building escape (can temporarily cool a burning wall long enough to run along a corridor to get to an exit)

However - there is still risk from water on electrical fires in 30+ year old wiring where RCD's might not be installed.

In the UK at least, full RCD protection for all domestic circuits was only mandated by the 18th edition of the wiring regs. They came into force in January 2019. Before that, it was typical to install split consumer units in which the sockets were RCD protected but the lighting circuits, smoke detectors etc were not. Even now, circuits in commercial settings can be installed without RCDs. Unfortunately then, there are still quite a lot of recent circuits out there that don't have full protection. Which is a shame because RCDs are excellent.

I thought water was already the recommended way of dealing with phone battery fires...? Did I have that wrong?

The link to the AAIB report in the article has gone stale. However, it's still available here: https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/aaib-investigation-to-boeing...

> “The CAA has received 166 reports of PEDs lost in passenger seats in the last five years. A quarter of these events resulted in fire or smoke in the cabin, demonstrating that this is a significant hazard to the safety of the aircraft.”

25% is a pretty high rate, if true.

> if true.

Exactly. I'd bet that the reporting rate for "undamaged PED was soon recovered" incidents is vastly lower than for "damaged PED caused smoke or fire in cabin" incidents.

I have read quit a bit about litjium batteries causing fires once a week on average on commercial airlines. ¹ (some cargo incidents are included).

I dont understand how the FAA has not banned cell phones / laptops /vape etc: anything with a lithium battery to be used while in the air, or really while in the plane.

Seemsm to me they should be deposited when you enter the cabin, and stored by the crew in a specialized container that can safely deal with fires, or prevent them from happening period.

Presumably it is due to the fact that passangers would feel unduly inconvenienced by having to spend a few hours without their Lithium powered tools?

We all have to go through elaborate security checks before boarding to ensure nobody is carrying anything dangerous onboard, yet devices that cause fires upto once a week are allowed through without any problems.

I must assume that this could be an exploitable vulnerability.

If someone intent on blowing up a plane was able to bring PCs, pads, or any device(s) that can contain large batteries could modify them slightly to allow a manual trigger.

Now perhaps one person is not enoguh, so how about 20, each bringing such a device on board.

Could it enough to bring an airplane down? Could it burn through a window? Or cause enough smoke to kill people? (I dont know how toxic the plumes from a lithium fire might be)

If this hypotetical situation could occur in real life then the whole secuirty theater we go through seems a bit faulty.

¹ https://explore.dot.gov/t/FAA/views/LithiumBatteries/Inciden... [2022]

I wondered why a news article would use the adjective “award-winning”, the I noticed on what page I was. Then I stopped reading. It’s just an ad.

What stood out to me in this advertisement is

> they feared using water could cause further problems as the seat’s mechanism was electrically-powered.

I've been on many flights but never once on an electrically-powered seat. Is that something you find in business/first-class ?

My recommendation is to never fly first class. It will ruin flying for you forever. Unless of course you can afford to fly first class for the rest of your life!

My first flight ever (in 1996 or 1997) was a massive delay due to a leaking battery on a wheelchair; I was upgraded to first class when they sorted everything out and rescheduled everyone. Talk about ruining expectations (I've never flown first class since).

I used to fly quite a bit from the UK to US and got upgraded a few times. I still remember getting bumped up to business on a place with full reclining seats that turned into a bed.

Come morning I slowly returned to upright and could see all the way down into cattle class - where I discovered that one of my colleagues had been on the same flight... he looked less than impressed.

Another time - pre 9/11 - I somehow managed to make it all the way through to boarding a day early for my flight. So they bumped me up a class to get me on the plane.

Yes, business and first class commonly have power-operated seat adjustments (recline, lay flat, extend foot rest).

I generally fly first class for 90% of flights and I've never seen an electrically-powered seat. I do only fly American domestic airlines though.

Domestic first class is usually just "extra extra legroom" and some comp treats and drinks. On cross-country flights sometimes you can lay almost flat.

It's missing the showers, the beds with full linens, the 1:1 attendant, the suites... If you get a chance try first class on Qatar airways, Singapore, etc

It varies.

Historically, you're right about domestic first class--which was similar to what's sometimes sold as premium economy these days.

However, some airlines (e.g. United) do sometimes have, in United's case, Polaris seating in business/first which is similar to/same as lie-plat Polaris seating in international. AFAIK, United just has the single Polaris class and doesn't have a separate first class like some airlines do.

For sure - I've had some good lie flat seats and perks on American cross country, and some of the jetblue mint seats are quite good. I also remember seeing a post here the other day about some very fancy domestic planes they are planning to use for people traveling to the super bowl.

My first experience with business and first class was long haul through the middle east, so the disappointment is still fresh for me a later time when I treated myself to first on a domestic flight and the only wonderful part of the experience was some juice in a glass while watching everyone else get on the plane.

Aren't water and lithium a terrible combination in general?

Lithium-ion batteries don't contain raw lithium. It's got the same explosive reactivity as the sodium in salt. Water is a good way of stopping thermal runaway through cooling.

Lithium batteries on the other hand do contain raw lithium and thus will react with water. These types of batteries aren't used in phones though.

Yes - Lay flat seats will be electrically powered

Cited occurrence took place in 2020.

> Mobile phones crushed after being lost down aircraft seats have sparked more than 40 fires on planes in the last 5 years...

> Although airline manufacturers are trying to improve seat design to stop these kind of lithium-ion battery crush incidents from happening it is proving to be a challenge...

> [Specific Incident Details]...the seat’s mechanism was electrically-powered. The [burning] red phone was hopelessly jammed in the mechanism...

Idea: Instead of trying to design "can never crush anything" seats, adopt a lower standard of "burning phones / pads / whatever ~can't get jammed in". Then train and equip the cabin crews to extract burning phones (fire tongs, gloves, etc.).

It is an idea that's for sure. I think we can all think of lots of reasons why having burning phones on an aircraft is something worth preventing though.

True. OTOH - if the incident rate is ~8/year, out of ~4e7 commercial airline flights per year, and designing seats capable of 0/year is proving difficult - maybe mere improvement would be a reasonable strategy? Available resources are kinda finite, and burning phones on aircraft are obviously not on the "World's Top 100 Human Safety Threats" list.

I'd be pretty surprised if this was a popular point of view. But it is your point of view and I respect that.

Hydraulic Press Channel just crushed a bunch of lithium ion batteries. It was impressive how intolerant they were to pressure and how much fire was produced.

Amazing that agencies like "Unicorn" that built that site can continue to get customers

This seems unfair. We have no idea who has been updating that site in the 8 years (presumably) since it last had any major changes - given the 2016 copyright statement.

Websites change hands. People try to take on updates in-house to save money. Who knows.

A cursory look at the agency's website shows they are perfectly capable of producing functional websites, so maybe let's not randomly disparage small companies when we have no idea of the context...

Presumably AvSax know what their website looks like.

It's pretty frightening that we're allowed to carry on these potential portable flammable devices as a societal norm. I wonder if aviation authorities have discussed banning such devices on board, and forcing it into luggage, but had to balance it with keeping ~~toddlers~~ people occupied, and the backlash such a measure would cause.

You don’t want these devices in the cargo hold. As your ability to handle any fire issue there is massively impaired by the fact that you cannot access them there easily. While in the cabin, issues are mostly identified early and they have working processes to handle them.

Yeah but they have active fire detection and suppression systems in the cargo hold.

Fire detection yes, but conventional suppression systems are useless against lithium battery fires. In the case of a lithium fire in the cargo hold, all the pilots can do is emergency land ASAP and pray that the fire won't damage too much of the control wiring until then.

Interesting, I didn't know that. I found this fire suppression company which makes a better suppressant than Halon and is specifically targeted for Li-ion fires: https://cellblockfcs.com/cellblockex/

Yeah but you gotta place your li-ion batteries inside the container of the device/battery and that container has to be rugged as well to withstand the intense heat and not release enough of that heat outside to ignite nearby other cargo.

That stuff definitely has its place for commercial shippers of li-ion stuff, but it's useless for normal traveller bags.

It may be a great approach for new build. It’s not doing anything for the thousands of planes in the air with a suppressant-specific system in place.

Just depressurize the cargo area.

It can't be depressurized independently from the passenger area. It's part of the same pressure vessel.

Battery fires like lithium-ion are self-oxidising.

Yes, so it will get very hot locally. However, the rest of the stuff in cargo will not catch fire, which is the main point.

Lithium ion battery fires are self-oxidizing, according to google search results.

See my answer to ben-schaaf's comment. It would destroy the suitcase of the owner of the phone, perhaps.

Wouldn’t it be worse in checked luggage? In the cargo hold a fire would have time to build up a serious level before detection. I think this is why you aren’t allowed to pack lithium batteries in checked luggage.

You are generally allowed lithium batteries in checked luggage. They must be installed in a device.

https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/portable-electronic-devi....

Rules are slightly different in Europe. It's recommended not to pack them in checked luggage, and battery banks and e-cigarettes can't be checked in.

https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/domains/passengers/dangerous-g...

I'm sure people have thought about it. Currently, spare lithium batteries are permitted in carry-on baggage only: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/lithium-batteries-baggage There is an exception for batteries installed in equipment for checked-in baggage if certain precautions are met.

While the referenced article is a product advertisement, the FAA lists quite a few incidents: https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/resources/lithium_batteries/incid...

Maybe issues related to in-flight charging could be prevent by changing regulations. For the rest, it's probably easier to deal with events before they spiral out of control if they occur in the cabin.

I agree. The fact that we go to such enormous lengths to prevent potentially nefarious items getting aboard an aircraft, yet we freely allow potentially explosive li-ion batteries is quite bizarre.

Spring we flew to Ireland with Ryanair. No reclinig seats.

Now I know another reason, why.

I promise you, that’s not why.

Certainly not the main reason, it's an additional one now.

No in that case that's not why :) they had special ultra thin seats made to be able to pack a row more.

Well known. Airlines including KLM specifically mention during their safety speech that if a device falls into the seat, you're to call an attendant rather than try to retrieve it.

This is mentioned in the article.

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