I just read the article and some of the comments. People seem to have no clue. Major brands have very safe cells. Ban the Chinese knockoffs and cheap brands, and the risk would diminish almost entirely. Maybe create a certification program for the major manufacturers so they still get to ride.
A ban increases the payoff for making convincing fakes. Prohibition doesn’t work.
Problem is — the people faking good cells have no concern for the risk — nobody can reach them.
Problem is — there’s no clean safe technology for making rechargeable batteries yet. They are being reinvented constantly.
The old manufacturing tools and methods get sold off to people who use them to make cheap shit.
Read my whole post. I suggested only allowing the major brands to ship via air/passenger. Even added that they could use a certification system. Anyone who doesn’t pass certification doesn’t get to ship - period. Labels don’t matter. Making your fakes more convincing doesn’t matter. Those things will get you nowhere.
Yeah, I just have no faith that a rule against anything stops it from happening, when there’s profit for someone in getting around the rule.
The tighter the chain of custody, the higher the cost.
I doubt anyone would implement a perfect valid identification system for our little flashlight batteries, just to save us the time involved in having them shipping by cargo carrier instead of on passenger aircraft.
They’re still not doing well identifying genuine vs. fake gear for aircraft parts and nuclear power plants.
international ban on rechargeable lithium battery shipments as cargo on passenger airlines.
it does not affect cargo flights. since 99.9% of li ions are shipped on cargo planes, not in a laggage on a passenger flight, i doubt we’ll have shortage, or price hike.
This is not about batteries in “luggage” — look at the Yahoo article linked at the top:
(I’d guess the latter is what eBay and Amazon and some China operations do — they collect all the packages meant to be shipped to a particular country, put them all in one shipment, and then break them out for delivery at the other end. Like this:
A while back I got 2 identical LEDs shipped from I forget, GB or BG, as replacements for ones that didn’t work.
One came with a label and US postage from a TMart address in New York — the label indicated it had been part of a big bundled shipment.
It went from China to New York in a bundle, then broken out and mailed to California
The other came direct from China to California, with a China label and postage. Both arrived the same day. The bundled shipment went an extra 6000 miles via New York with extra handling at TMart — in the same time the individual China Post package took to cross the Pacific.
That’s why the worry about these big boxes full of little packages — we’ve most of us seen how they package li-ions, often carelessly.
I hope that 30% is above the level where a cell gets damaged.
I think they should force the stores that ship batteries to pack them properly in battery plastic battery cases or those cardboard battery boxes that RMM ships small things in. Not loose in a Bag-O-Batteries like some of them do.
This is only a problem if you live in a place not easily serviced by cargo planes or cargo ships.
Bare batteries are still allowed on cargo planes and in your carry-on luggage. The effect should be minimal for the vast majority of people reading this.
There was a time when passenger flights accounted for a large portion of cargo lift. The problem is that changes after 9/11 made it impossible to ship most of that cargo on passenger aircraft. Couple that with the very high passenger load factors (which reduces the available freight lift), and to be blunt, Cargo has become a small part of the domestic passenger airline business. I refer you to the most recent Delta Airlines form 10Q SEC filing on www.delta.com. According to that filing, passenger revenue… $9.139 Billion, Cargo revenue $207 million. In other words cargo revenue was about 2% of passenger revenue and less than 2% of total revenue for the April-June 2015 quarter.
There was a time when many of major passenger airlines actually had Cargo only aircraft in the fleet. Those days are long past, and only a very small fraction of the total air cargo market is in the hands of the domestic airlines these days
That article is BS. That is investigators with no clue as to what happened (but still needing to give an answer) using a catch all to say batteries were suspected. The truth is that there are forensic tests that can show if batteries were the most probable culprit and even if so....I would bet more on a laptop with a cheap replacement battery as the probable cause.