ThinkPad Battery Explodes at LAX Airport -- Laptop Ban on Planes Inevitable?

In a rather dramatic eventFriday afternoon(9/15)at LAX airport (Los Angeles) a man's IBM ThinkPad battery exploded in the airport terminal. Luckily, the man was able to get the flaming laptop off of the plane by running up the jetway the wrong way as passengers were trying to board instead of the laptop actually bursting into flames on board the plane.

Gizmodo.com has a first hand account from somebody that was actually at LAX airport and watched the incident occur: From Gizmodo:

"So we're waiting for a flight in the United lounge at LAX, the flight next to ours was heading to London and in the middle of final boarding, when suddenly this guy comes running the wrong way up the jetway, pushing other boarding passengers out of the way, he quickly drops his laptop on the floor and the thing immediately flares up like a giant firework for about 15 seconds, then catches fire. About a hundred other people in the lounge jumped up and began a mix of gawking and general panic, I clearly heard a few fleeing individuals saying something about terrorists. The fire burned for a minute while everybody just stared at it, then another flare up, this one much larger than the first, drove a larger group of gawkers away. Eventually, the high intensity flaring calmed down and a larger fire kicked in, all the while letting off a thick cloud of white smoke that was slowly filling the terminal. Finally, an employee came over with a fire extinguisher and put it out of its misery."

Picture of the exploded ThinkPad with the battery compartment obviously very charred, the white powder and coloring is from the extinguisher that was used.

Apparently the man that had the laptop had checked to make sure the battery was not on any recall list, and it was not. But it certainly exploded characteristically like problematic Dell laptops and Apple laptops that have been recalled.

It's just really lucky the plane had not taken off or pulled away from the jetway, in which case the laptop would have been flaming on board the plane and who knows what the end result of that would be. Obviously this is a close call and the NTSB is going to be investigating this incident and since we already knew laptop usage on planes was being investigated, this won't help the case. An incident like this makes you wonder how long it is before in flightlaptop use when running on batteries is just banned altogether. Which would be a black eye to both the airline and notebook industry.

Update (9/18/06): According to two posters on Engadget.com this incident occurred on Friday afternoon at LAX and was at Gate 77. The actual man who's laptop exploded confirms it was a ThinkPad T43: "And yes, it's a ThinkPad T43. I don't know if it was a Sony battery - I can't tell now that it's a charred mess, but my guess is that it was if they made them for IBM. I was using it 30 minutes before and it had no problems. It was even turned off and in my bag when it caught fire. So even if the computer is off, there's still a risk of a fire - now that's scary."

Links to relevant posts on Engadget.com:

• http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/16/thinkpad-explodes-at-lax-ignites-bomb-scare/comments/2124633/
• http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/16/thinkpad-explodes-at-lax-ignites-bomb-scare/comments/2126484/

 

This sucks.

 

Is that an X60?

 

was that a sony battery?

 

Has to be. I read that Lenovo uses Sony Batteries.

 

just great..any 2+ hour flight without a laptop kinda sucks.

 

Wow, Sony must've have some real problems with their battery making - if I'm not mistaken, all of the laptops that have exploded were ones with Sony batteries.

 

I think so.

 

uuu aren't Sony shares gonna plunge :/ (well, that's what i'm into, heh)

 

Argh, Sony spoiled it for the rest of us. Now I'll just have to revert to watching movies and listening to music on long flights.

 

I mean, I think a large part of this is that people have gone overboard on laptops being as powerful as desktops. It's just not practical to keep cramming more and more into small packages.

Yes I know the batteries were badly built, but I think the underlying problem is that laptops have become too hot/powerful/internally crowded. Also is anyone looking in Intel's direction as regards shoddy power requirements information?
Dual core is nice, but I think a step back from the original pentium M in terms of power/practicality.

I want something like the A8J as much as the next guy, but maybe more time should be spent on R&D instead of finding creative and (apparently) dangerous ways to fit powerhungry components into smaller chassises.

 

Is it just me or should Sony be sued over this? This is starting to sound real crazy.. like a secret government propagenda is going on or something lol.

 

You'd like to think that's what the problem is, but it really has nothing to do with it. Power consumption in notebook parts has been on a decline, not on a rise.

Heat generation is the same way. Yes, you can gripe about modern notebooks being very hot, but the old Mobile P4s were liable to scorch your lap.

And then the big question is...these notebooks that have had exploding batteries have been using different parts and hardware within (albeit most from Intel). If it's really a heat/power consumption issue, why aren't AMD notebook batteries exploding? AMD's mobile chips generate more heat than Intel's do, at least the Mobile Athlon 64s.

This is a problem that can be traced squarely back to Sony and has nothing to do with the other components in the machines. Sony's QC on their notebook batteries has apparently royally screwed the pooch.

I guess the question we should be asking now is: what other manufacturers use Sony batteries?

 

I'd be interested to see some coroboration of this story. Any other reports besides this one?

 

This has obviously become more visable of a problem since the Dell laptop in Tokyo exploded. So we're going to hear alot more stories about exploding laptop batteries from all makes now. I'm sure there are what were considered isolated incidents of makes other than Dell and Apple exploding prior.

Anyways I take back everything I said in the last News Bit. The time to joke is over, this is getting dangerous. I would also like to ask how many more makes use Sony Batteries (Maybe we should start checking this as part of our reviews) and what companies Sony owns that are also making batteries? Those are flying under the radar right now.

To the arguement that notebooks are exploding because there getting hotter. They were way hotter than this 2 years ago. I wouldn't of been suprised if my P4 Toshiba caught fire.

 

Lithium-ion batteries are inherently unstable - that is, they WILL explode if not properly taken care of. Couple that with an acknowledged problem in Sony's manufacturing line, and you have this (statistically, less than 10 cases in perhaps 10 millions of batteries is not that bad). It really has nothing to do with notebooks getting more powerful and I daresay had it not been Sony it would be someone else. We had 5 cases of exploding mobile phones, all from Motorola. One of them burnt a house down, another severely injured the owner.

 

My lenovo c100 (cheap one) uses a sanyo battery. No exploding for me

 

Toshiba doesnt have the problem. yay http://www.toshibadirect.com/content/pc/b2c/sonyBattery.html

 

I'm not totally sold on that.

 

Considering how close this laptop came to being in the air and the relatively high number of incidents in a somewhat short period of time recently, I would not be surprised to see laptop use banned on airplanes. Keep in mind the ban on liquids and gels recently as short-lived as it was.

Who's willing to risk the safety and well-being (or at the very least feeling safer) of hundreds so that a handful of passengers can use their laptops onboard? I know the ones who want to use their laptops in-flight might object, but is a few hours of work really worth the risk? I think even hardcore workaholics would concede this point if they had to imagine their own family members stuck on a plane with an exploding laptop. Imagine the pandemonium on a plane in the air.

Apparently this problem is bigger than it may have seemed at first. It doesn't really help that laptops are getting more popular these days either.

 

So now you want to talk about the potential risks of modern conveniences?

All modern conveniences have risks. Have you any idea how much power is coursing through your walls as we speak? It's this kind of paranoia that troubles me, because this IS a slippery slope, if the short-lived ban on liquids has taught us anything.

It's a slippery slope for the number of conveniences we can expect to enjoy on an airplane, to the point where it's just one monotonous sitfest, and it's a slippery slope for the conveniences we enjoy outside of the airplane.

We're allowed to have open flames in our homes. We had Xbox 360s whose power supplies were catching fire. People smoke.

There are inherent risks with anything you want to enjoy because electricity is inherently dangerous. This was a manufacturing defect. No, I don't want to see this limit the use of laptops on planes because altogether, these are an isolated incident, a result of poor quality control.

If you count these against the tens of millions of notebooks still fully operational in the wild, your odds of your laptop battery exploding are the same as if not less than the plane itself catching fire in mid air and sending you plummeting to a grisly demise.

At this point, for how much trouble we're going through with air security, we might as well just ban the **** planes themselves. All these paranoid air security protocols are PR bullcrap anyhow. If a terrorist wants to hijack a plane, he/she can, so if we're all going to sit under our desks with our heads between our legs, we might as well take the planes out of the skies, get the cars off our roads, and possibly consider not even using a horse and cart anymore, because the cart can tip, or it could be loaded with gunpowder, or the horse could get rabies, or...

 

i think it might be worth while to tally the size of the laptop that result in the exploding battery...

we seen 15.4 and 14... was there 13 and 12 or 17 catching on fire?

also we never have a clear explosion pattern, ie is always under use? can it happen while the laptop is on standby? hibernate? or simply with the battery on the laptop itself...

As it gets more serious, more serious study or findings need to be done to describe these pattern and better inform users.

sony probably let the profit get to them than consumer safety as they are struggling to stay on top of the competitions.

just some random thoughts...

sg

 

well, there are a lot more Intel notebooks then AMD notebooks...

 

Pulp, you are misunderstanding my post. I am not pro-ban on anything without good cause.

I am merely stating that the FAA or NTSB can now justifiably ban all laptop use on planes. That would end the issue right then and there--real or imagined--in the minds of the passengers who would be shaken by all of this. And I imagine that would be a larger number than those who wouldn't be.

The general public will not rationalize that these are isolated incidents. Would you say that every passenger can shrug off these incidents as you have? Not very likely.

Yes there are risks involved with everything. But this is quite a bit different from being in a metal can 30,000 feet in the air with no viable escape route should somebody else's laptop burst into flames. At least if your house catches on fire your neighbors can move down the street.

I don't want to see a laptop ban on planes any more than you do. But the airline industry has to give their passengers a feeling of security in order to survive. Their having a hard enough time as it is without this making it more difficult for them.

It is a very low percentage of laptops that have caught on fire or exploded. But that doesn't matter to the person who would be shaken by this most recent incident. This one almost got in the air.

 

just checked to be sure - my T43 has a Sanyo battery.

 

This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about World War 2 and life back stateside. (He couldn’t go because of medical reasons). Anyway, there was this parachute packing plant that packed hundreds of thousands of parachutes. The quality control was very tight for obvious reasons, but they had a failure rate of .1%. While this margin was acceptable for most production lines even above and BEYOND acceptable. This still would leave 100 un-opening parachutes per 100,000 packed.

This is not acceptable. So, to counter act this, the company instituted a policy that everyone in the company would partake in Q.C. By jumping out of airplanes with the chutes they packed. Needless to say, that caused great motivation for the employees to make sure every chute got packed correctly.

Moral: make sure your employee’s are motivated properly.

 

Do Gateway and HP use Sony batteries? My roommates have them, I have a Dell with a Sanyo battery.

 

That's it! Everyone boards the plane naked, NO laptops, clothes, ipods, walkmans, books, food, DVD players, NOTHING. Even the pilot must be naked.

Seriously this is bad for the future use of laptops on planes. There has to be some truth to the high demand on batteries these days. I really hope it doesn't take a plane going up in flames for something to be done.

 

Excellent point. If we are going to ban laptops because of the extremely rare possibility of a battery fire, then go ahead and ban the airplane itself given the rare possibility of something going wrong. Mechanical and electrical things cannot be made 100% safe 100% of the time. Modern life requires a degree of risk.

 

It should be while under draw, the higher the worse.
(note: Reltive to the batteries ability, a 1.2v 1a battery being drawn at 1.2v 9a, is in far more danger than a 48v 10a battery being drawn at 48v 1a...)

This is due to the simple property of resistance, yes batteies a power supply have resistance, not to mention that its an energy producing chemical reaction going on inside the battery, which produces additional heat beyond that produced by its resistance.
Also, while charging it follows a simular pattern... and also heats up. Much thanks to resistance, and that the reaction this way is very inefficeant, and wasted energy is leached in the form of heat. So realy while unplugged in hibernate, or turned off, the chances should be incredibly lower simply because the combustive reaction cannot occur as easily when cool. Less energy present, less reaction.

Yes systems that have worse thermal statistics for their battries produce higher chances, but not by much. Since, though varible to how flawed a lion battery is, the amount of heat for a preticular one to combust, remains the same, and the same cells are used across... *Shrugs*
Oh, and nothing says a 20inch notebook with some obcene battery cant have better thermal statsitics for its battery rig than a 14 inch non-gaming system, its more complex than that.

This is mostly just basic theory appling chemestry, some knowlage about battey powered system, and obsurvations after playing around with some rechargible batteries in the past.

 

The stoppage of all air travel would be far more disruptive to the modern world than stopping a handful of passengers per flight from using their laptops for a few hours. It would be an inconvenience if I weren't allowed to use my laptop onboard and I wouldn't be happy about it either. But I can definitely understand the reasoning behind it if it came to that.

When it comes to the benefit of the many, it will always come at the expense of the few. Smoking on airplanes used to be common too.

Nothing is 100% safe, that is true. But the FAA cannot go to the public and say, "Hey, there's a risk in everything. Laptops probably won't explode." The general public is not a rational animal. They won't accept that as a proper response and far too many people are edgy about flying to begin with. They won't be understanding about an additional risk (even if it is miniscule or imagined) onboard their flight because sitting on a plane is too boring for someone else.

It would be, however, a sad day for the laptop world if a ban was put in place.

 

Why don't they just design some containment compartment that can role down the aisle on wheels, then when a laptop decides to explode, the stewardiss can throw the laptop in the containment compartment that would let the laptop burn inside it with out any harm to the passengers, I think this would shut up everyones *****ing.

 

I don't understand, the battery just gave off sparks, it did not explode like a C4 or anything like that. They should have fire extinguisher on board the plane right? I am sure a small fire work won't do too much damage.

 

We should all buy ASUS and we won't have any of these problems.

 

Closed environment... toxic fumes... yeah....

 

MMM if they do want to ban laptops lets hope we can still take them on and use the planes power many of them have a plug in the seats perhaps not be able to take the battery onboard.

 

Who make the batterys for Asus?

 

wait, is it lenovo or IBM? i know lenovo bought the thinkpad line but how come people still say IBM.

 

DEVON u read my mind! lol, actually this stuff is already made! just not implemented on aeroplane industry/system.

 

How many pro-laptop people here would honestly still be in favour of laptop use on planes if it had erupted into flames at 30,000 feet, rather than on the ground, and injured dozens of people on board due to potential fire and fumes? It may be a nuisance to not be allowed your laptop on a plane but you have to accept that laptop batterys exploding is now a very real risk, even if it is (literally) 1 in a million. I'd rather not be allowed my laptop on a flight than risk people dieing.

 

I think it was a pre-Lenovo unit, but that doesn't really matter. I'd be pretty bent if they got rid of notebooks, especially on long haul flights. Now, if they want to put power adaptors in all the seats, then fine, I'll check my battery. But where do you draw the line? Personal DVD players, iPODS, watches? I mean, let's not get too reactionary here.

 

but we havent seen a flaming or smoldering ipod or other personal electronic device...we have seen this laptop Sony battery flaming issue happen multiple times now...bad for notebook users, we dont have much of an argument to the powers that be screw Sony.

 

Has anyone actually seen a reputable news agency reporting this alleged incident? A Google search of "thinkpad fire LAX" only turns up the same article posted on blogs and forums.

You'd think at least the LA Times would know about it.

Dave

 

3 out out of the 8 times I have flow in the last two years, the airline has lost my luggage. It turned up all three times, thankfully.

I highly doubt most people will check their $2000 laptops unless the airlines change their liability policy on lost luggage.

Since when is it short-lived? TSA page stil says 'no' to carrying on virtually every liquid and gel.

 

I completely agree w/you there and what about the roughness I've seen my luggage tossed around like it was a sack of potatos.

 

Doesnt it just scare you knowing that the laptop your using at the moment at home could just "blow up"? Most people dont have any fire extuingsher at home? So basically you have a risk of losing the house because of a laptop exploading.

Very scary indeed.

 

Laptop ban on planes? that's no good, how will I bring my new laptop over from the US?

 

I think ASUS uses two brands, Samsung, and themselves


Naked airliners? Where do I sign up?

 

The batteries are blowing up because of an internal short, not because the laptop is drawing to much power or because the battery is overheating. So the blame falls completely on sony, since so far they are the only ones that have produced faulty batteries.

Also if the battery catches on fire, a fire extinguisher isnt going to do anything since its burning the chemicals in the battery itself. Your best bet would be to dump water on it to try and cool it down.

I dont know how toxic the fumes would be but Im sure that those little oxygen masks would come down so you could breath with that.

Sony really effed up big time here. When you think of a battery failing you think its because it wont hold a charge or something like that, not that it will self ignite.

 

How about the TSA puts up a notice saying anybody with an flaming or exploding object aboard a plane may get shot by air marshals on suspicion of terrorist intent? THAT might give some people pause before they pull out their laptops on board. Remember the bipolar patient who got killed by air marshals as he ran OUT of the plane after landing in Miami because he was shouting and may have (or may not have) said something about a bomb?