Virgin and Qantas to ban use of portable power banks after string of fires | Hacker News Reader

Virgin and Qantas to ban use of portable power banks after string of fires

abc.net.au

66 pointsmryall74 comments

The 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.

Yep. 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.

Or 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.

It’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.

We'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.

I swear the majority of UL and CE marked electronics on amazon are fraudulent. Honestly, I don't think certification is going to work, at least not with out a long term economic policy to onshore manufacture. There's just no practical system for verifying certification when the origin is obfuscated for the majority of our good, and produced outside of our regulatory system. We also just don't make these things in sufficient quantity, or economically enough to supplant the import market.

I think the mistake here is not printing the registration number on the products themselves so that you can type it into the portal or whatever and look up what it’s supposed to look like. Like photo ID.

I 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.

And when they do work, my North American two prong plug falls right out half of the time.

That 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.

A 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.

British 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.

Indeed! 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

Also when the cable is pulled out of the plug by force, the live disconnects first, then neutral, and only then earth.

BS1363 is an abortion.

You pay for it though, both in terms of extra manufacturing costs (presumably) and weight/bulk. Compare the north american apple usb-c power adapter to the british one:

https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co...

The lower power versions have collapseble pins though:

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/mgtv4b/a/40w-dynamic-p... (the clonking sound is extremely satisfying!)

The high watt chargers are heavy regardless

Does that US version even stay in the socket given the weight?

Tbh it's pretty tiny price to pay. And 5 -pack of double sockets costs £13 btw! ($17 ish)

Or make the seatback USB solution a bit more modular and update it every 5 years. Nobody is bringing a toaster on board, they just need something more than a 5 Watt USB A port for their devices.

You have to look up the maximum wattage for the given cabin configuration. I’ve found 30W to be about as high as I can go without it cutting out. Use a phone charger for your laptop.

This is where it’s helpful to have a multi-port charger where they’re not all high-draw.

IMO more important to go with something flat or light that won’t fall out under its own weight.

Assuming this is USB-C ports, they're supposed to negotiate a supported power limit with the device you plug in. If the port is saying "I can deliver 60W" and then cutting out if you draw more than 30, there's something wrong with their chargers.

There is something wrong with their chargers.

I'm assuming he's talking about the mains socket.

China 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-xiao...

I 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.

I’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

The 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.

I’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.

I'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

Title should be updated to Virgin Australia. The article doesn't reference Virgin Atlantic or any other Virgin brands.

Is 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?

Because 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).

It'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.

Isn't LFP dense enough for power banks now? And far more stable/safe?

Heck, isn't Sodium Ion getting good enough now?

LFP is too much nuance, they will just ban "lithium" and that'll be that.

As batteries pack more and more energy into smaller and smaller spaces, what could possibly go wrong?

“Australian airlines will ban the use of portable power banks… and Emirates”

>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

Maybe the airlines would change their mind if you offered to indemnify them.

I'm absolutely OK with a rule change that prevents one in-flight fire every two years.

And I'm glad you don't work in risk management.

Doesn'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!

What if, indeed…

https://www.skolnik.com/blog/how-airlines-are-enforcing-the-...

> 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.

Meanwhile 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

Most people don't have nuclear bombs.

Yes but what I mean is that nobody checks anything

You haven't flown in the US in the last 24 years.

I meant on train dude, try to follow the discourse

Citation needed

A 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.

I 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.

I 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.

I disagree with there being no danger at 5nm.

Depending on courses and speeds that 5nm could go to zero in as little as 16 seconds or so. Airliners are not especially maneuverable.

Yes, the odds of the courses actually intersecting are small, but not zero.

Yes, of course that’s my point. We have to draw large safety margins around these systems, and then we have to treat incidents that breach those margins as seriously as we would an actual collision.

Naturally it's why it's so much safer, but the options for air travel safety most certainly aren't uniquely only between "as safe as possible" or "not safe at all". It should be no different than how we weigh safety regulation for any other mode of travel, and this kind of "either we do everything possible or we won't have safety" instead of focusing purely on what the measured target should be and how we currently measure against it is precisely the irrationality around it.

It's holding the global economy back actually who cares about the global economy...it's holding our personal happiness by making flight more expensive than it should be.

If I want to fly somewhere I already know that once I land there I face a considerable risk when I get in the metropolis. Risk of illness, violence, assault etc. Some metropolis are worse and some are better but the risk is always there.

The plane is the least of my problems.

The monopoly of aircraft production and the fact that planes can be used everywhere in the world is forcing us to withstand the same level of risk tolerance as the U.S. , and not even avg U.S citizen....for obvious reasons due to what happened theatrically some 25 years ago the risk tolerance of aviation is forced to be the same as Billionaire's Row , Central Park West , NYC, NY and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.

On the other hand...trains get to do this and nobody cares because they are local not global:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsN5_NoffsY

The FAA and the FDA are enemies of progress

> > The day that we decide to stop focussing on what could go wrong, is the day that aviation stops being safe

A rebalancing vis a vis cars, buses, ships and trains is due. All the effort and man hours wasted trying to clear the last 0.01% in aviation would be better spent focusing on the other means of transportation, or other stuff that actually kills people period. The goal is not to die period. Not avoiding dying of aviation crash, and planes are about the last culprit as far as stuff that kills people worldwide on a yearly basis.

They are far behind dogs, actually my intuition says that they are behind a very calm and friendly breed such as German Shepherds, they are calm and friendly alright but as far as dog breeds worldwide for sure they kill > 200 people yearly.

I'd board a 95% plane if it means that once landed I could step on a 95% safe train or bus. Or a 95% safe city for that matter , Instead now the values are:

Plane : 99.9999999% safe

Train: 80% safe depending on the city and amount of crime in subway

Bus : 70% safe again depending on the city and amount of crime

City as a whole: Between crime, 6000 puounds vehicles speeding through the streets etc...I guess much less than 70%

The cognitive dissonance of people living in urban hells where crime is rampant and risk of death from assault , robbery or outright murder and then being afraid of flying tells you all you need to know. And no, it doesn't happen solely in Africa....San Francisco is a good example of that.

Are you seriously suggesting the 20% of train trips and 30% of bus trips and in death or injury?

Big if true!

On a global basis yes, they end up with injury or theft or molesties or attempt at such

I have, for a while now, wondered when an airborne battery incident will be calamitous enough for a complete ban on power banks.

There was one accident, but it was a pallet of batteries on a cargo plane that killed the crew.

Uncontrolled 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.

What 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

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

Non-zero:

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

So we just need to limit to 80,999 power banks on a plane at once

Aviation rules are written in blood. Everything you snidely dismiss actually happened and people died/came close to dying, so the rule was added.

What about all other means of transportation?

Is the blood shed by aviation more red or more special then?

It's not, it's the fact that the whole concept of flight goes against human intuition so it will always feel fishy and unsafe , even though the physics is much sounder and I'd say even safer than all other forms of transportation

There are reasons more than a million people die on the roads every year, but that number only cracks a thousand for commercial aviation in particularly bad years. Most of those reasons are that all aviation incidents and accidents are analyzed to inform how the industry operates, but for road accidents we just shrug and say, "people die in accidents, whatever can we do?"

Exaclty. And this is fucking wrong and insane because the goal of a human should be not to die, not to avoid a particular type of death (eg. aviation death) . It's not like if you die on the car drive to the airport or because you are stabbed in the subway it's okay because you respawn

This is the same cognitive failure that happens with

Sharks v. Mosquitos and

Nuclear v. Fossil fuels

It seems to me you are defending the cognitive failure instead of arguing for the re-establishment of risk/reward parity also considering the enormous benefits of aviation which enables us to get from one point of the globe to the opposite in less than a day

That's an interesting windmill you've constructed whole-cloth from what was written.

Speaking for rail safety alone: rules are written in hypothetical blood. The FRA and similar bodies in CAN and EU are VERY proactive about safety, as are the light rail train companies themselves.

In fact, new safety regs are often suggested by rail companies, who observe previously-unexpected situations IRL (despite the best attempts to nail these down in advance).

You're enjoying tossing around a lot of "What if"s, out of ignorance, but modern transit safety is not based on some dude sitting around and thinking up rules for funsies. It's a highly intensive engineering process, with multiple layers of cross-checking.

And then millions of us get behind the wheel, and there's nothing anyone can do about decisions made by each of them. Car safety is based on the hope people fear getting tickets, and some soft design aids.

> > Speaking for rail safety alone: rules are written in hypothetical blood. The FRA and similar bodies in CAN and EU are VERY proactive about safety, as are the light rail train companies themselves.

Trains make thousands of victims each year, I think worldwide the number borders the 10,000 from all causes and nobody gets on their case like planes which in a good year make 0 victims per year worldwide

So you have it the other way around, the hypotetical blood is the aviation one and the real blood is the one shed by trains and yet the scare factor is all on planes

So should we increase the "scare factor" on rail transport or reduce it on air transport?

Did 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.

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