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Comment by broadsidepicnic | Hacker News Reader

Pilot here.

While I definitely approve this and consider the limit to be one too many, I wish ecigarettes would be rather the target as soon as possible. Those are dangerous, and lately the most potential culprit for lithium related problems aboard.

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That is surprising to me, considering the sheer number of phones/tablets/laptops on every flight. Does anyone maintain a list of incidents?

I can't imagine that the QA process for vapes is better than even the _super_ budget tablet or phone, though.

Surely the other way around? Phone QA process >>> disposable vape QA process...

You’re both saying the same thing.

It's not even just a QA thing, consider the use case: A sub-ohm vape head is basically almost shorting what is often a unprotected lithium ion cell (18650 or whatnot). Phones meanwhile are full of temperature sensors, battery pack in the phone has some kind of firmware/monitoring, board on the phone has a charge controller.

There are plenty of good cell manufacturers that won't have problems in this current dumping situation (and will have certain passive protections like a CID to cut the current if it gets too hot). Problem is people like cheap and there are sketchy knockoff cells without those protections and shoddy manufacturing quality.

If there was anything recently that forced the change it was probably the CT scans of the Haribo battery packs showing the cathode/anode overlap. This sort of thing should spook airlines.

Do we still have UL? Do they test battery packs? Why not make it a requirement to only fly with ones that pass lab testing like UL?

For anyone else wonder about this:

> If there was anything recently that forced the change it was probably the CT scans of the Haribo battery packs showing the cathode/anode overlap.

It seems to be this, and yeah, it seems actually bad:

https://www.theverge.com/news/818906/haribo-gummy-bear-power...

Monkey paw curls. Good news! All cheap Chinese vapes now put a UL logo on them, making it impossible to find an actually certified vape.

No need, they already have their own CE https://www.hqts.com/differences-between-ce-conformite-europ...

Phones, tablets, and laptops are not sold in bodegas, designed to be disposable, and thus made as incredibly cheaply as possible.

The high end vapes use huge amounts of current to the point that vape users will specifically seek unprotected cells because the protection circuitry adds a slight bit of internal resistance.

So then the unprotected cells can then short out in their bags or otherwise be damaged and fail when the vape electronics fail...

I think many don't appreciate just how horrifically cheap and dangerous some of this stuff is. Not just vapes, but things like charging bricks too.

I'm generally not a proponent of draconian regulation but I firmly believe that any electronics handling substantial voltage not approved by UL or similar should be rejected at the border. It's all dangerous and incentive to manufacture it needs to be curbed.

I have seen things approved by those sort of organizations that were extremely dangerous, such as a listed fire alarm that when installed has a significant chance of becoming silently deactivated.

With that said, it can be even worse when it isn't listed.

E cigarettes work by shorting the battery releasing a lot of instantenous heat. Their safety controller firmware are often of ... Dubious quality. It can happen quite often that the cigarette doesn't stop shorting the battery and catch fire as a result.

Making fire is literally their function unlike a laptop.

Combine that with basically unregulated and semi illegal supply chain and it becomes a recipe for disaster

AFAIK that's not really true, at least of modern vapes. Their function is not to "make fire", it's to heat a metal coil to a specific temperature at which propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin will aerosolize which is far lower than ignition temperature. Most modern vapes also use controllers with a feedback loop that pulse power through the coil hundreds of times per second to maintain the ideal temperature and desired power throughput. That being said there are definitely crappy and diy devices that unsafely dump huge current through devices but AFAIK modern devices generally don't do this because it's a bad user experience (burnt taste, too hot, ruined cotton absorber, etc) -- regulating the power is what users want so it's what devices do.

A large portion of this can be avoided if arplanes just exposed a power slot in entry row like is standard in long haul flights

Not really, as people would still carry power-banks, vapes, and so on in their carry on, to use when getting to their destination.

It's not charging a device during flight that's the issue.

On recent WestJet flights they announced that you can't use a power bank if there is seat power available, all the flights had seat power except the smallest plane (Dash 8) and that flight was only 18 minutes. They also didn't want any batter powered devices in the overhead compartments.

On the 737s there were only two plugs per 3 seats so not everyone could be plugged in.

They’re working on stuffing us on top of each other instead.

I’m an average person and my shoulders and knees are all pushing against everything.

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