US Considering Banning All Laptops on Flights From Europe

Earlier this year, the United States banned all laptops on flights to the United States from 10 airports in Africa and the Middle East, out of fears that bombs could be smuggled in the devices and used to destroy an aircraft or create a hostage situation mid-flight. Now, there are reports that the Department of Homeland Security is about to issue a much, much broader version of that edict.

The new rule would ban laptops from airplane cabins on all flights from Europe. The DHS has not confirmed this, but told The Daily Beast, “No final decisions have been made on expanding the restriction on large electronic devices in aircraft cabins; however, it is under consideration. DHS continues to evaluate the threat environment and will make changes when necessary to keep air travelers safe.”

Earlier this year, The Daily Beast reported multiple intelligence officials as claiming that al Qaeda had created bombs small enough to fit into laptop batteries, enabling them to be smuggled aboard an aircraft. Such devices still require manual detonation, however, which is why the ban earlier this year and the potential Europe-wide ban under discussion at the DHS continue to allow laptops in checked baggage.

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It turns out, however, that there are problems with this approach. As we all know–and if you didn’t, Samsung held a charming refreshing course last year with the Galaxy Note 7–lithium-ion batteries can suffer what’s known as “thermal runaway.” While this might conjure images of people fleeing a sauna that’s been accidentally set to “Deep Fat Fry,” the reality is more serious, particularly within the confines of an airplane. Thermal runaway is a positive feedback loop, in which changes in temperature drive further changes in temperature, pushing the system out of equilibrium.

Thermal runaway can affect many products and systems, not just batteries. But the end results in the confines of an airplane could be catastrophic, particularly if the batteries are locked in the hold of an aircraft and cannot be reached in the event of fire. More importantly, as The Daily Beast details, halon fire suppressant isn’t useful against lithium-ion battery fires. Automatic fire suppression tests in 2015 had no effect on a lithium-ion battery fire, and the resulting test conditions would have destroyed the airplane.

Now, the risk from any single device igniting in a cargo hold is small, as is the amount of energy in any given lithium-ion battery. In and of itself, the risk to a single airplane is minimal. But imagine the potential risks of packing an airplane’s cargo hold full of suitcases, with each suitcase holding at least one lithium-ion device. Suddenly, what was a single point of failure has become hundreds of points of failure. Halon fire suppressant may not work particularly well on a battery fire, but there’s still only so much battery to burn. Pack a ton of laptops altogether, and the chances that the fire can leap from one bag to the next (igniting a new battery every jump) go up substantially. This is one situation where having a battery in the cabin may well be less dangerous than packing them away in the cargo hold, since humans can respond to any problems before they become a critical issue.

Separate from this, there’s the enormous burden this would place on travelers from Europe. When you’re stuck in an airplane for 6-8 hours, you’ll see plenty of people working from laptops for either business or pleasure. This new rule, if DHS declares it, would make traveling from Europe downright annoying. Of course, it’s better to be annoyed than to have a plane blown out of the sky. But packing all of the lithium ion batteries on a plane into the same cargo hold really doesn’t seem like it improves the threat profile, at least not to us.

DHS has continued to maintain that this change is under advisement, but with a rule supposedly arriving on Thursday, we won’t have long to wait to find out.

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