News Laptop fire caused American Airlines jet to be evacuated

[Admin]

A laptop fire on a passenger jet precipitated a dramatic emergency evacuation on Friday. American Airlines Flight 2045 was getting ready to fly from San Franciso to Miami when the cabin started to fill with smoke - it was coming from the rear of the plane, from a laptop bag.

Laptop fire caused American Airlines jet to be evacuated : Read more

 

[Unolocogringo]

More stupid arrogant Americans.
We have become a society of "ME" I sadly admit.

 

[NinoPino]

Sad evacuation.

 

[USAFRet]

More stupid arrogant Americans.
We have become a society of "ME" I sadly admit.

Soooo....no one else on the planet carries battery powered devices?
Interesting.

 

[bit_user]

First, isn't there some guideline for reducing the risk, like charging only to 85% or something like that?

Second, the article seems to talk about a wholly different issue:

"I’ve experienced a severe overheating issue with a Dell Latitude that didn't sleep or shut down when the lid was closed - but I caught it before there was much in the way of smoke (or fire) thanks to a strong burning plastic smell. The battery in that device could be quickly detached using a sliding mechanism, but it couldn't be used again as the keyboard keys had melted."

Was that really the battery? I've had a laptop fan fail. The i5-1250P CPU was throttling back, all the way to 400 MHz on a single core, because it was also riding a temperature of 100 C. This involved a laptop sitting in the open, in normal room temperature (68 - 72 F) office. I'm pretty sure it could not throttle back any further. If it'd been confined to a zipped bag, for enough time, just the CPU heat alone could probably have done such damage.

 

[pixelpusher220]

More stupid arrogant Americans.
We have become a society of "ME" I sadly admit.

The 'ME' mantra here is people literally stopping during an *evacuation* to open the bins and take bags.

 

[abufrejoval]

I remember loosing two laptops in flights, because for some reason Windows 10 just wouldn't stay off, when I told it to suspend to disk (had the "fast start" disabled to ensure they were really off).

They'd power on in the middle of the flight, then struggle with cooling folded together and tightly packed in, and started destroying their batteries.

One was a ChuWi passive device for which there was no spare battery to be had ("you can send it to China for repairs"), for the other getting a spare was only an expense I could have done without.

I really hate the type of "I know better and manage your PC for you" mantra, that entered into Windows, because I knew that I wanted those computers to stay off, when I made sure they'd be really powered off when I put them in the bag before those flights.

But evidently there is now BIOS support for timed power on and they used that for scheduled maintenance.

I guess I should be grateful they didn't bring those planes down...

 

[mevinyavin]

I'm way too much of a control freak for using sleep at all, for this reason. I simply shut down my computer entirely (either off or hibernate if in middle of something). Sleep has too much potential for the computer turning on by itself, and I can't handle that possibility.
As for hibernate "ruining" the SSD - that's the way I want to use my SSD, thank you very much, and when it breaks, I'll happily pay to replace it. I keep my data in three places, after all.

 

[bit_user]

As for hibernate "ruining" the SSD - that's the way I want to use my SSD, thank you very much, and when it breaks, I'll happily pay to replace it. I keep my data in three places, after all.

I don't believe hibernate would ruin a SSD, unless it was happening dozens of times per day. Even then, you'd probably need to have a lot of RAM, with most of it in use, and a relatively small SSD. Otherwise, I just don't see it adding up to a significant number of DWPD.

 

[KyaraM]

I would just turn off the device when not in use. Basically zero risk of anything happening, and I frankly don't get why you would keep it turned on when you are not using it either. I had it once as a teen that a laptop started overheating because of exactly that, me not shutting it off properly before storing it away. Thankfully I caught it before anything happened, but man did that teach me a lesson for live.

 

[bit_user]

I simply shut down my computer entirely (either off or hibernate if in middle of something). Sleep has too much potential for the computer turning on by itself, and I can't handle that possibility.

I would just turn off the device when not in use. Basically zero risk of anything happening,

@abufrejoval seemed to be describing exactly this scenario, yet Windows would schedule BIOS to power up at routine intervals to perform maintenance tasks.

 

[nameless0ne]

We have Microsoft to thank for no one trusting the "Sleep" function. Win 10 would fail to go into sleep and worse yet - would hang with the CPU at max. At this state it wouldn't even thermal throttle. This heat alone in a bag could ignite or cause the battery to vent. And then they introduced modern sleep that just eats your battery until it is empty. Saw this on multiple devices from different manufacturers.
And people like the convenience of just closing the lid and continuing to work after they open it. In a perfect world no one would shut down/restart their PCs unless they need it for updates.

 

[Amdlova]

All batery devices need to be placed on a fireproof bag... no one will die if your belongs has take aways some time.

 

[Silas Sanchez]

Most of the energy released in a violent explosive event with flames is actually contained within the flammable electrolyte itself which never changes regardless of the SoC, all the charge does it provide the heating (by short circuit) to initiate thermal runaway. What extra charge does it go into heating during a short circuit which in turn can ignite flammable materials, a danger even with chemistries that have low flammable electrolyte solvents. Since lithium ion have very low IR even smaller amounts of charge can be enough to heat up a cell in a short circuit. High perf cells that have lower capacity (like LMO and even NMC) can deliver enormous currents without much voltage sag. But its the high capacity cells that are alot more dangerous due to the thin separators between the neg and pos terminals, this along with defects like internal dendrites are the main culprits at the bare cell level. Of course this is only valid for high quality stuff.
So keeping the battery dead flat is safest.
This is all largely why laptops have that ridiculous 99wh limit.

 

[mevinyavin]

@abufrejoval seemed to be describing exactly this scenario, yet Windows would schedule BIOS to power up at routine intervals to perform maintenance tasks.

Is that really true? I thought that was only possible when it was plugged in.

I don't believe hibernate would ruin a SSD, unless it was happening dozens of times per day. Even then, you'd probably need to have a lot of RAM, with most of it in use, and a relatively small SSD. Otherwise, I just don't see it adding up to a significant number of DWPD.

Of course not - I've been watching the wear on my SSD and remain unconvinced, hence "ruining" in quotation marks. Yet you still have to dig around in settings to even make Hibernate an option...

 

[USAFRet]

All batery devices need to be placed on a fireproof bag... no one will die if your belongs has take aways some time.

"All"?

My Kindle eBook?
Smart watch, hearing aids, pacemaker?

 

[abufrejoval]

@abufrejoval seemed to be describing exactly this scenario, yet Windows would schedule BIOS to power up at routine intervals to perform maintenance tasks.

Yes, that's the thing: a suspend to disk is supposed to power off the computer completely, yet have it resume from where it was using the RAM state from the storage. I do that with VMs all the time, I had done it with earlier versions of Windows and with Linux, there was just no reason for those machines to turn back on before I hit the switch only because I upgraded the OS...

...yet they did, using some magic, that M$ introduced either to make things easier, or because the fruity cult had that feature.

 

[ThatMouse]

If I die on an airplane, it's going to be on the ground and due to smoke inhalation, because everyone wanted their bags.

 

[abufrejoval]

I'm way too much of a control freak for using sleep at all, for this reason. I simply shut down my computer entirely (either off or hibernate if in middle of something). Sleep has too much potential for the computer turning on by itself, and I can't handle that possibility.
As for hibernate "ruining" the SSD - that's the way I want to use my SSD, thank you very much, and when it breaks, I'll happily pay to replace it. I keep my data in three places, after all.

I wouldn't call myself a control freak, but obviously I tend to think that I know what I am doing and use that to control what I want to happen.

And when I tell the computer to suspend to disk, I expect it to follow orders.

And of course I got first bitten when I then swapped the SSDs and resumed the other OS and image, because Microsoft had actually made the "suspend to disk" a "suspend to disk, but also to RAM and try to restart from RAM first" with Windows 10, which fails very badly when the OS that matched the RAM contents is no longer there...

I'm pretty sure that's another fruity cult feature, which might work there, because you can swap neither storage nor OS on that trash, unlike on Personal Computers.

So I learned to disable the "fast start option" so "suspend to disk" would be nothing else, yet still those machines started to reboot on their own, using a BIOS timer mechanism evidently, beause they did a normal boot first...

...and then hung at the Grub OS selection prompt with evidently a busy wait loop.

I later diagnosed the problem, also wanted to see if disconnecting the laptop before doing a suspend to disk would avoid the BIOS timer being activated: it didn't.

Effectively Windows suspend to disk, which was originally designed to be a productivity enhancement in the times of DOS, is now broken beyond redemption, don't know if it ever got fixed later: I no longer dare to try.

 

[abufrejoval]

Was that really the battery? I've had a laptop fan fail. The i5-1250P CPU was throttling back, all the way to 400 MHz on a single core, because it was also riding a temperature of 100 C. This involved a laptop sitting in the open, in normal room temperature (68 - 72 F) office. I'm pretty sure it could not throttle back any further. If it'd been confined to a zipped bag, for enough time, just the CPU heat alone could probably have done such damage.

Modern CPUs have several self-protection mechanisms, reducing the clock is one of them, but if that's not enough, they will literally stop the clock until the temperature is safe to continue. That's why the temperature should never exceed the hard limit of 100°C (or whatever it is for a given chip).

Those videos where CPUs burn into a crisp after removing the cooler should no longer be possible, because those fail-safes were quickly put in, but because a CPU stopped for potentially long milliseconds would wreak havoc with OS scheduling logic, lost interrupts, lost DMA data etc., slowing the clock was then introduced to let not just the chip survive, but also the OS to continue operating.

So I'd rather exclude chippery as the original culprit and point my finger towards the battery, where the normal failsafe would have had to fail in order to start a fire.

While the foils around the battery should usually avoid oxygen able to enter, one problem can be limited room for expansion. If the laptop were to be packed tight or if the battery had already gassed and then the laptop was mishandled, the foil bag can break and then oxygen can enter.

One of my sons got himself one of those super robust phones from Honk Kong some years back, with 2-3x normal battery size and built like a tank. He is a voluntary fire fighter so it tends to get some extra physical stress and eventually the battery got damanged and wanted to gas...

Except that with the chassis built like a tank, nothing would bent and it exploded through the SD-card cover. No fire in this case, but plenty of ugly, smelly electrolyte and a phone that was beyond repair due to fluid damage.

 

[Heiro78]

Soooo....no one else on the planet carries battery powered devices?
Interesting.

I took their comment about arrogance being the passengers who were looking to get their bags before evacuating the airplane. Not that an american was the one to have brought a laptop on the plane.

 

[bit_user]

If I die on an airplane, it's going to be on the ground and due to smoke inhalation, because everyone wanted their bags.

There was a Japanese plane that recently burned up on the ground. All 379 occupants made it out alive, after remaining calm and following instructions.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...nes-what-happened-cabin-crew-safety-survivors
​

 

[bit_user]

Modern CPUs have several self-protection mechanisms, reducing the clock is one of them, but if that's not enough, they will literally stop the clock until the temperature is safe to continue. That's why the temperature should never exceed the hard limit of 100°C (or whatever it is for a given chip).

Right. I'm not saying the CPU would go above 100 C, but I'm conjecturing that if this happens and the laptop is in a bag, then enough heat could build up in the bag to cause physical damage to the laptop.

One of my sons got himself one of those super robust phones from Honk Kong some years back, with 2-3x normal battery size and built like a tank. He is a voluntary fire fighter so it tends to get some extra physical stress and eventually the battery got damanged and wanted to gas...

Except that with the chassis built like a tank, nothing would bent and it exploded through the SD-card cover.

From what I understand, this was the issue Samsung had with than infamous, old Galaxy Note model. The battery wasn't allowed to expand, so it just exploded instead.

 

[bigdragon]

I hope the FAA is watching that video over and over again. What should have been a quick and easy evacuation went so incredibly wrong that regulators should be losing sleep over that human gridlock.

I want to chastise the people who held things up so they could grab their bags. However, we live in a society where it's acceptable for airlines and insurance companies to not pay out for disruptions or losses. Reimbursement, if it happens at all, can take years. You the individual are responsible for working around someone else's screw up. Perhaps a different status quo would make people feel safe to leave their things behind.

 

[USAFRet]

I took their comment about arrogance being the passengers who were looking to get their bags before evacuating the airplane. Not that an american was the one to have brought a laptop on the plane.

In hindsight, this is probably correct.

But also, you can find recent reports of unruly passengers from any nationality.

Brits rioting, German threatening to take the plane down...heck...two Air France pilots fighting!
Its not just the "ugly American". People are the problem.