Comment by quantummagic
7 hours ago
Limiting the devices to two per person seems nonsensical to me. The devices are either dangerous, or they're not. If they're dangerous, two is too many. And if they're not, then why limit them only to two?
7 hours ago
Limiting the devices to two per person seems nonsensical to me. The devices are either dangerous, or they're not. If they're dangerous, two is too many. And if they're not, then why limit them only to two?
> The devices are either dangerous, or they're not
That's not actually how it works though, it's all a risk and percentages. Nobody says "driving is either safe or it's not" or "delivering a baby is either safe or it's not"
Correct, but I agree with the parent that this is a dubious case to apply that reasoning.
To make it clearer, imagine another context: "It's dangerous for a passenger to have a gun on board. Therefore, we're strictly limiting passengers to only two guns."
Like, no. The relevant sad case is present with one gun just as with two.
Of course, what complicates it is that these power banks present a small but relevant risk of burning and killing everyone on board. So yeah, you might be below the risk threshold if everyone brought two, but not three. So it's not inherently a stupid idea, but requires a really precise risk calculation to justify that figure.
That's not actually how it works though. There's a reason we restrict people to zero bombs allowed on board.
Only because bombs don’t charge as well. Aerosol cans and flammable liquids (e.g. alcohol) are allowed; in small quantities - just like power banks.
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Maybe it's a sort of build-quality proxy.
Someone bringing 150 "lipstick" single-cell promotional chargers -> bad
Someone bringing one phone and one laptop battery pack -> OK
If you are limited to two, you are probably not bringing anything that is near e-waste quality.
More batteries, more likely that you'll have even just one of them fail. Since even one of them (to your point) failing is enough of a reason to divert the flight, better to start by reducing the probability of that happening in ways people can swallow.
So having 500 batteries on board is okay.. but 750 is too risky? I just have a hard time believing that the math is actually mathing in this case. Maybe you're right, and this is just a first step to get people to gradually accept more restrictions.
These items are dangerous. The FAA limit for power bank capacity is 100Wh (~27000mAh), which is 360kJ of energy. A hand grenade has approximately 700-800 kJ of energy.
Two powerbanks contain the same amount of energy as a hand grenade.
That's a kind of meaningless comparison. Peanuts are about 8kJ per gram supposedly, by your measure we should ban even small amounts of peanuts on planes because 100 grams of them contain more energy than a hand grenade. Without talking about the time frame over which the energy can be released you'd have to make sure that everybody went onto the plane completely naked lest their clothes ignited.
Not good enough, body fat contains about 35kJ per gram. So nobody with over 1lb of excess body should be allowed on board. People are known to occasionally spontaneously combust.
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Quantity is a quality of its own.
Maybe there is enough plane onboard capacity to deal with just 50 batteries, let's say; multiply the failure rate expected and the pax capacity of the plane and you get how many batteries you can afford to have onboard and still be able to deal with worst case scenario.
Way to lean into binary thinking.
Do you save your snark for batteries only, or are you equally liberally minded with your non-binary thinking about the number of bombs allowed on board?
You've now used this fallacious analogy twice.
Clearly, battery packs have more legit utility for more people at much lower risk than a bomb.
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