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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.3 ms ] threadHeck, isn't Sodium Ion getting good enough now?
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
They're smaller, and thus contain less energy, and are typically also less powerful.
So about one every two years. Better ban everything with a battery before this gets out of control.../s
And I'm glad you don't work in risk management.
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.
https://www.travelofchina.com/china-power-bank-ban-2025-xiao...
It was a missed opportunity for someone to not have opened an approved power bank store just past security.
If the issue is quality control is there certification that airlines might require?
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).
At some point lithium ion battery packs are going to be completely excluded from luggage and it’ll be chaos
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.
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.