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 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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And when they do work, my North American two prong plug falls right out half of the time.
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
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.
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.
I'm assuming he's talking about the mains socket.
There is something wrong with their chargers.
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’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
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).
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
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”
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
Cigarette 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
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.
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.
Most people don't have nuclear bombs.
Yes but what I mean is that nobody checks anything
Citation needed