Hot Topic: Be Afraid... Be Very Afraid!

While this week’s topic may seem to relate to an in-flight entertainment horror movie, we are referring to another subject in the same environment – burning Li-ion batteries on an aircraft in flight. To really get the existential import of this concept you need to see the video at Gizmodo. By the way, it is not the purpose of this Hot Topic to point the finger of blame; we were trying to understand the issue. Clearly, we were not trained in this expertise but we found very few people who do have answers…and many more that surprised us with questions. Based on the above images, we provide the following:

Burning Lithium Ion Battery Recommendation 1.
Get the heck out of the vicinity if you can, and, do not throw your drink on the fire!

We started with the FAA who was most helpful and most concerned. One FAA contact told IFExpress, “Lithium batteries and their associated equipment is probably the number one concern of the FAA Office of Hazardous Materials right now. Bill Wilkening has been leading the charge to tighten the exceptions that presently allow most lithium batteries to be shipped as cargo without being declared or labeled as hazardous materials.” At the end of this piece is a list of documents that readers might find interesting. In general, it looks like airlines get the final responsibilities of policing PED’s brought on by passengers, and thus, the batteries too. Airlines we contacted wouldn’t return our calls after we identified why we were calling. We don’t blame them; this is a tough issue…and those liabilities! If there is an airline solution to burning batteries, specifically Li-ion, we don’t know about it. Testing has shown that there are issues with Li-ion fires and resultant toxicity. We also note that while many of the tests have been performed via overcharging Lithium cells they do not always fail as a result of that condition. In fact, the latest Sony battery failures and resultant recall were as a result of metallic impurities in the battery itself and thus on-aircraft powering has little to do with this failure mechanism. Further, if you note the FAA incident reporting you will see that many batteries failed while in a bag or while accidentally turned on after being stowed.

The attached CAA paper is interesting and very useful, although it has a few contradictions to FAA testing specifically in the effectiveness of Halon. It should also be noted that these test conditions do not replicate some real world situations where a laptop is openly sitting on a tray table on in a seatback pouch. We should note at this point that we know little about cabin fire extinguishers and their effectively with regard to batteries and could find little in the literature about actual usage and applications on aircraft.

Burning Lithium-Ion Battery Recommendation 2
It would be interesting to see test results of flammability and resultant toxicity of a Lithium-Ion battery fire in an actual airframe!

The application of a fire blanket appears to be of value as noted in the CAA tests. The desire to reduce the smoke, flame and thus the accompanying toxicity is a desirable goal in a battery fire especially in an enclosed environment such as an airplane. Carrying this concept further, a fire retardant bag/glove to quickly contain the burning device and move it to a less passenger intensive area would make sense (Don’t ask us who has to do it, however)! Getting the semi-extinguished hot stuff stowed is another interesting problem. If, for example, a crewmember were to scoop the blanket covered burning battery device into a fire retarding container – then what? Where is the still burning device to be placed? One contact at an airplane manufacturer noted that any location for such a volatile pile would need a much protected location on the plane, even possibly vented to exhaust the smoke and toxic vapors. As the CAA paper states, “If a battery fire does occur, it will most certainly cause severe harm to passengers in the immediate vicinity”…that’s enough for me!

Burning Lithium-Ion Battery Recommendation 3
No doubt, the industry would be served if a study group were formed with a simple goal to provide an emergency, a short term and a long term solution. Perhaps the WAEA TC needs to take up the flag on this subject, bringing together FAA, Airlines, fire and battery experts, airplane manufacturers and a scientist or two who understand the mechanism and toxicity of such an unplanned event.

This Hot Topic, while off topic, is one we felt needed to be addressed and we apologize to the WAEA for recommending their ownership without discussing the topic with them. We talked to enough people to think that there is no consistent way to ameliorate the problems arising from burning batteries; much less testing that verifies the hypothesis of the toxicity. Believe us, the out gassing of theses cells are dangerous enough in an open environment and we want people to get a bit more proactive. The video we saw is really frightening and we think all aircrews need to be made aware of this statistically probable event. Hats off to airlines and organizations that have this issue in their sights, now let’s share the information.