I am guessing many have read about this, but after April 1st next month this could effect the cost and availability of purchasing all types of Lithium Ion cells? > No bulk batteries as cargo on passenger planes from April 1st 2016 – 18650 Battery | BATTERY BRO
That cargo manifest for MH370 unsettled the industry.
I don’t know if that’s pounds or kilograms but it’s a lot of cells, and they didn’t want to admit they’d been shipping them on passenger flights.
The cargo pilots and the aircraft manufacturers both wanted a complete ban, to protect pilots and aircraft, but the industry didn’t go that far yet.
The persistent problem is shippers who lie about what’s in the shipments, this won’t stop that.
1990 plus 463, either way if its KG or LBS its quite a lot.
So we should stock up now?
From that article
Lithium ion powered transport devices (mainly hoverboards eg. self-balancing scooters) should be brought into the cabin with the passenger. So in the case of a thermal runaway event, people can all help to put out the fire and it won’t go out of control.
Say what?
No escaping gasses there
And indeed as mentioned before, senders must be honest, and all the cheap li ions I have received were not labeled as such.
> Say what?
Say that over 2000 pounds (or kilograms) of cells in a big shipping case, located in the cargo where it can disable the aircraft completely, is a greater risk than one device catching fire in the passenger area.
Though on the evidence so far any airline allowing a hoverboard on as hand carried baggage should be thinking harder. Cell phone and laptop packs have had to be made safer with various protection circuits over the past few years after their episodes of fires. Hoverboards are brand new and they’ve learned nothing from history so they’re repeating it.
Restrictions will get tighter with time- I think that is clearly were things are going now. That could cause delays, and perhaps somewhat higher prices as sellers and shippers have to deal with the new regulations. But we will always be able to get our beloved cells- no need to panic buy just yet. Just don’t wait till the last moment to order so you’ll get them in a reasonable amount of time.
Phil
Yes when you bring an extra 2000kg of cells in the mix, maybe I misread but I thought these 2000kg would be in cargo-flights and/or ships.
Both would be bad situations, but better escaping gases in the cabin than an uncontrollable fire in the cargo hold.
Yup, like all those 30Q “chargers” everybody recently received.
KuoH
Literally hundreds of pilots, maintenance personnel, and others with great knowledge of the subject have spoken their thoughts on PPRUNE and almost all have completely discounted a LiIon fire as a possibility on MH 370 though they have brought down other aircraft. They had fire detection system for the hold and would have certainly made it known if they had a fire on board.
The “packs” (HVAC/pressurization systems) on airliners have limited ability to add fresh air or filter out poisonous gasses. A large venting episode in the cabin would affect most of the passengers on board; the real question would be whether the concentrations were high enough to cause them medical problems. The ‘oxygen masks’ overhead would also not help much if at all. They are designed only to avoid hxpoxia long enough for the plane to descend to 10,000’ or lower where the outside air has enough oxygen to support human life. They do not provide “breathing air”.
The inconvenient truth will not stop those set on keeping LiIon cellss out of airliners (and maybe even transport aircraft too). The Media is also going to do all it can to keep the story going; their typical un-knowledgeable and sensationalist approach. Add the recent hoverboard problems and you can easily see tighter regulations coming. It’s not “if”, it’s “when” and “how much”.
I see a bad moon rising but we will get through the darkness somehow.
Phil
That’s probably why the airline denied carrying them on that flight at first.
EDIT: Wikipedia has the actual weight and some info on location in the cargo hold.
Most airlines had already voluntarily stopped carrying them on passenger flights, after several cargo flight fires and crashes.
You’d think so. But why?
I follow pprune — it’s a mix of experience and speculation, and “rumor” is in the name for a reason.
Here’s that thread discussing li-ion fires in aircraft, and Flight 370 in particular.
pprune lithium battery fire flight 370 - Google Search will get you pointers to discussion and meta-discussion.
It’s not a simple easy answer.
You can’t rely on what you read there as more than opinion, unless you know the person who wrote it.
Remember — nobody heard anything at all from the aircraft.
That silence doesn’t prove there was no fire.
That silence doesn’t prove or disprove anything except that communications didn’t happen.
Something happened.
Silence as and after the aircraft disappeared can’t prove anything at all.
It’s a known concern. Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers have been clear their aircraft can’t safely carry these cargos.
The ban is to last until the packaging of these cargos has been improved.
That’s likely to take a year or two.
You do see it all on PPRUNE (including me on the rare occasion). And anything is possible. But the triple-7 does have good protection for critical systems (unlike some planes) so a complete loss of comms because of a cargo fire is almost unthinkable until the fire is well-advanced. Also the known flight-time sans comms is such that a large fire would have melted airframe components causing a mid-air breakup, and there is zilch evidence of that happening. So it didn’t happen that way.
I do agree that there’s a problem with LiIon air shipments. A lot of the dangers are avoidable or at least reducible to levels we can live with. That will require training, more competent people, better loading techniques, better packaging, and money which nobody wants to spend unless they are forced to. But no matter what we do there will be an idiot who will find a way to create a hazard where none need have existed so there can never be absolute safety. And the problem goes much deeper than just LiIon shipping- the numerous separate corporations which are involved in getting flights through safely always point the finger to somebody else, creating a quagmire that can take several years to sort out. There are no “Harry Trumans” saying the buck stops here.
Until a “safety first’ approach is forced onto all involved we will just get needless restrictions, often not well-based in reality, because it’s simpler, easier, and less costly to do it that way. If it were a mandatory ‘hanging offense’ to cause or contribute to a LiIon fire on an airplane, the bad things would almost completely stop happening instantly. As much as the Chinese business culture gets bashed here, I recall that during the Y2K scare, China made all it’s airline executives be on a flight as the clock rolled over and they told them that would happen ahead of time. Those guys knew their butts were going to be on the line so they made sure there were no hidden problems waiting to kill them.
We need a similar approach with LiIons where those responsible for the problems are directly at personal risk for any mistakes they make. Then no mistakes will be made and if there are, they will positively not be repeated >-)
Phil
This line seems to cloud the issue
“But again, that is about personal use, not about bulk shipments. ICAO has released a clarification stressing this point here:
Additional Clarifications on New Lithium Ion Shipment Restrictions ”
well if the decision is made all cellsmust be transported via sea-ships, I gladly wait longer.
Would not want anything to happen to a plane. And well, with the ease of wrapper replacement and because non honest vendors, the same type that would rewrap an unsafe cell, can just label them wrong ordering from China seems like a bad idea.
Thinking about the 4 panasonics ordered yesterday with huge discount, hmmm no way of knowing if they are legit and send correctly. Not nice, for future buys of cells I will refrain to vendors with a EU warehouse and only order there, they will have the time to ship these cells to their EU warehhouses with a boat, yes seems logical to do it like this.
I’m pretty sure most Chinese vendors use a bird when sending parcel by free shipping that would explain the time it takes to send and why so many get lost lol
Those darn underfed pigeons 
AW of Hong Kong has been shipping their cells using sea-ship/surface mail for quite some time already as they stated that Hong Kong Post prohibited the shipping of Li-Ion batteries using air mail.
Andrew Wang clearly states that if his customers are not willing to wait 2 to 3 months for his batteries, they can purchased his batteries direct from their countries AW authorised dealers.
Since Swedish Post, which many of these China online dealers used to ship Li-Ion batteries has prohibited the shipping of these batteries, I think we have to bare the long shipping period if we want to enjoy the low price batteries from these dealers.
As they say, Cheap + Good =/= Fast
At least passengers aren’t involved- the passenger pigeons are all gone now 
Sea shipping of non-bulk products is mostly done with containers these days. So what would happen if a LiIon fire occurred in the bottom container at sea where they could not remove it from the ship or get to it with fire hoses? The problem still exists- it’s only been shifted elsewhere.
Until those who are responsible are held fully accountable for their sins this problem will not go away. That goes for everything, not just LiIon shipping
Phil
yea but shipping container are air tight so it will starve of oxygen. The container will just be to hot to touch…
Nope- Lithium fires generate their own oxygen- it even burns underwater- which is why CO2 fire extinguishers are not effective on them.
Phil