Smoking Smartphone Sparks Emergency Evacuation of Alaska Airlines Jet, Two Taken To Hospital (theregister.com) 113
Passengers escaped an Alaska Airlines jet via emergency slides on Monday night after a malfunctioning smartphone filled the cabin with smoke. The Register reports: The pilot ordered the evacuation of flight 751 from New Orleans to Seattle after someone's cellphone started to spit out sparks and smoke just after landing. As the aircraft was still waiting on the tarmac at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for a gate, the slides were deployed and all 129 passengers and six crew made it out. The errant mobile was also stuffed in a bag to curb its compact conflagration. Two people, we're told, were taken to hospital.
"The crew acted swiftly using fire extinguishers and a battery containment bag to stop the phone from smoking," a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines told The Register. "Crew members deployed the evacuation slides due to hazy conditions inside the cabin. Two guests were treated at a local area hospital." Airport officials, meanwhile, said "only minor scrapes and bruises were reported." It's unknown which device malfunctioned on this flight, but it makes us think back to the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco of 2016 that prompted Samsung to formally recall the smartphone after nearly 100 reports of them catching fire and spewing noxious black smoke. The Note 7 was also banned from aircraft in the United States under an emergency order.
"The crew acted swiftly using fire extinguishers and a battery containment bag to stop the phone from smoking," a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines told The Register. "Crew members deployed the evacuation slides due to hazy conditions inside the cabin. Two guests were treated at a local area hospital." Airport officials, meanwhile, said "only minor scrapes and bruises were reported." It's unknown which device malfunctioned on this flight, but it makes us think back to the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco of 2016 that prompted Samsung to formally recall the smartphone after nearly 100 reports of them catching fire and spewing noxious black smoke. The Note 7 was also banned from aircraft in the United States under an emergency order.
Welll, of course... (Score:3, Funny)
As we all know, every electronic device has smoke stored inside. ;)
If you release the smoke, you can't put it back in.
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Mostly correct for most systems.
But some older computers were stem powered, when the steam got out from the IBM 360, it stopped working..
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Re:Welll, of course... (Score:5, Informative)
No, Many early mainframes were water cooled. So we used to joke about the old computers being steam powered and newer smoke powered..
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Re:Welll, of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so much still popular as popular again. Nobody was really water cooling the P54C, even though it needed it even if you weren't overclocking. Computers just cost too much back then to risk them with liquids :) Some of the Cray machines used liquid cooling, and ISTR that one of the later ones even used water, but earlier machines used Flourinert(sp?)
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It's not so much still popular as popular again.
Yes and no. I was a watercooler back in the earlier days where PC gaming became popular. It was a pretty sorry sight. You'd attend a large LAN party with several hundred PCs and you'd be lucky if you could find one other person with a watercooled gaming rig, then you'd sit and discuss all the parts you had to make yourself, which fishtank pump you were using, which of the two CPU blocks on the market you were using, and how cool the green shitty car radiator coolant looked flowing through your system.
These
Computational Tribology (Score:2)
If the bearings run dry, the differential engine could start giving off smoke.
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As we all know, every electronic device has smoke stored inside. ;)
If you release the smoke, you can't put it back in.
Hence FAA regulations prohibit you from releasing the smoke whilst on board this aircraft.
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As we all know, every electronic device has smoke stored inside. If you release the smoke, you can't put it back in. ;)
Hence FAA regulations prohibit you from releasing the smoke whilst on board this aircraft.
And, certainly while the "No Smoking" signs are illuminated ...
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Re:Welll, of course... (Score:5, Informative)
They do have battery fire containment bags on board, they are even mentioned in the article..
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It also mentions they were on the ground. Wonder why they couldn't just throw it out of the door after they got it in the bag instead of making everybody evacuate?
Re:Welll, of course... (Score:5, Informative)
It also mentions they were on the ground. Wonder why they couldn't just throw it out of the door after they got it in the bag instead of making everybody evacuate?
Erm... because the smoke is highly toxic? https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
The first thing to do in any fire ever is to get away from the smoke as quickly as possible.
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The first thing to do in any fire ever is to get away from the smoke as quickly as possible.
Yes, but in an airplane you can’t really get away or put the smoke back. Probably going to have to roll down a few windows till the plane lands.
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Indeed, modern building fire safety is all about keeping smoke away from people long enough for them to get out of the building. Forget trying to extinguish the fire, in fact often things like a sprinkler system do more damage than the fire itself.
Smoke is mostly what kills people.
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But when they're on the ground where evacuation is, evacuation would still be standard procedure to completely isolate the people from the toxins as well as possible.
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How does adding oxygen to the toxic smoke help?
Just out of curiosity, have you ever mixed an ounce of whiskey with milk?
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
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No, they do not. They do not provide 'air to inhale in a smoky environment', they provide OXYGEN (not air) in case the cabin loses pressure and there is not enough oxygen to support life.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
Just out of curiosity, have you ever mixed an ounce of whiskey with milk?
White Russian:
1 2/3 oz (5 parts) Vodka
1 oz (3 parts) Fresh cream
2/3 oz (2 parts) Coffee liqueur
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I do like my White Russians and Caucasians though, so I'm with e3m4n on that one.
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The O2 masks don't replace the cabin air, they just enrich it with O2, so they won't prevent inhaling toxic gases.
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Re: Welll, of course... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is called training, and flight crews do a lot of it. I imagine the training for 'smoke in the cabin while on the ground' is something like: for each exit, make sure the ground is not more dangerous (ie fire), open the exit, deploy the slide, get everyone off the plane. Yes, there may be some bumps and bruises, but everyone is ALIVE, and that is the critical thing.
You don't want your flight crew (cockpit or cabin) 'thinking' in an emergency, you want them to execute pre-defined and pre-trained actions. If they have to think about what to do their own panic could cloud their judgement.
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Cabin ventilation is one of the things touted as a counter to air travel and covid risks.
Sure, by idiots and by disingenuous PR flacks. In the real world, you're breathing a lot of shit air in an airplane [jamanetwork.com], even when the seals haven't failed and you're not sucking exhaust. (And as the link shows, it doesn't matter whether they're recirculating air.) The internal air filters are bypass filters, most of the air doesn't even go through them.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
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Hell, it wasn't all THAT long ago when you could still smoke a cigarette on a flight, and even back then the ventilation could clear the air of half a plane smoking cigs.
I gotta imagine they are even a bit better now.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
Smoking bans on planes (Score:3)
I think the reasoning might be "numerous", but:
1. Not all countries passed smoking bans at the same time. Given that planes are often built for international markets... Even if it isn't a feature to be used new, it might be used when the plane is sold to a foreign market.
2. Legal inertia. The FAA declared that there shall be lit no-smoking signs, so there will be lit no-smoking signs. You can at least minimize the wiring when it doesn't ever need to be switched.
3. Institutional and training inertia:
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There may also be international travelers that are used to different smoking rules.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
When there is an emergency like this, nobody is going to stop and think "Should we deploy the masks because they cost less to replace than the ramps?". Remember that human lives (are supposed to) come first before material expenses.
Also, the toxic smoke from Li-Ion batteries is hazardous to other parts of your body besides your lungs.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:1)
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You have to be insane to think that the flight crew had 'no sort of prior training'. They have extensive training, and practice constantly. And you can bet the training for 'smoke in the cabin while on the ground' is 'get everyone off the plane, now!'
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
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You have to be insane to think that the flight crew had 'no sort of prior training'. They have extensive training, and practice constantly. And you can bet the training for 'smoke in the cabin while on the ground' is 'get everyone off the plane, now!'
Yes, because -- if anyone's not getting this -- where there's smoke, there could be fire -- both are bad on plane. People need to leave as quickly as possible.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
So it would seem the response was more destructive than the device, once it was contained in the bag.
That's true this time. But suppose the crew made the judgment that the threat was contained and they could wait till they got to the gate, but it turned out they got it wrong -- the bag failed to contain the phone fire and it spread to some seats or the phone fire was a decoy to mask a worse fire elsewhere. No one would want to be in the position of trying to explain how they killed off half the cabin that way. And no one should be in the position of having to decide which of those cases is true in a crisis
Flames on a Plane (Score:2)
"This is your Captain speaking." Nothing to be alarmed -- we put a cell phone that overheated in a containment bag we keep for such contingencies. I will increase the rate of cabin ventilation to reduce the amount of acrid smoke until we are assigned a gate, but in the mean time, take shallow breaths and try not to inhale this stuff."
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It also mentions they were on the ground. Wonder why they couldn't just throw it out of the door after they got it in the bag instead of making everybody evacuate?
With haze of unknown toxicity in the cabin, slides are the fastest way to exit the cabin. The first priority is getting everyone out as quickly as possible in such a situation. The last thing they needs is passengers to start to panic and rush to the door or have one pass out.
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I think this is probably the correct answer.
See smoke? Evacuate!
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They do have battery fire containment bags on board, they are even mentioned in the article..
Why not just throw the phone out of the door instead of the people?
I can see how a smoking phone can be deadly at 30,000 feet, but since they were already on the ground, and able to put the phone in a bag, is seems panicky over-reaction. The smoke from a shorted Li-Ion battery is not that bad, unless they set other things on fire. Don't ask me how I know.
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Seriously, as a former fire fighter, there's good reasons why evacuating people from places where the air has become toxic is among the highest priorities, because the longer they breathe in those toxins, the worse the damage to their health gets.
When there were people to evacuate it was standard procedure to take some emergency gas masks with us that could be quickly strapped ov
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:1)
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A proper hazardous environment mask isolates the entire face of a person from the environment. But with those drop down masks you have sensitive parts like the eyes exposed to the environment.
It's likely that they use such masks and tell people to keep their eyes closed if there's no other option available, like during flight. But when there's safer options available to isolate people from a hazardous environment, those are to be taken.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
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They could have even just opened all the doors and still performed a normal egress. ...
Pretty much what they did, other than the fact that first step is a doozie. Hence the slides (which deploy automatically unless the attendant first disarms them).
Keep in mind that FAA regulations require a 90 second evacuation. This does not leave much time for a coordinated situational assessment, awaiting stair-truck(s) arrival, nor taxiing to jetway.
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There was a story a few years back about a man who lived in a moderately rural area of California and had a rapidly advancing wildfire headed his way. He was a trained SCUBA diver with all his own gear, and he was cut off from escape - but he had a full swimming pool. He got a couple of tanks and threw them in the water (they last a long, long time at that shallow of a depth). Then he settled down at about 5 feet depth and waited it out. House gone, car gone,
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Drop-down masks 'for that exact reason'? Maybe you should stop talking before you look any stupider. The masks are not there to provide oxygen in case of a fire (what a great idea!), they are there in case the cabin loses pressure. Loss of pressure causes the masks to deploy, not fire.
Re: Welll, of course... (Score:2)
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Those oxygen masks are supplemental - they're not god damn SCUBA gear or hazmat suits. They enrich oxygen mixture for use with depressurization events.
Trained flight crews know this, and are probably told explicitly NOT to drop the masks in case of fire, not wanting to enrich the oxygen environment where a fire is burning.
Re: Well, of course... (Score:2)
You do remember your pre-flight briefing where they tell you to pull down on the mask to activate the oxygen flow? If nobody pulls down on the mask lanyard, there is no oxygen flowing to those masks.
The supplemental oxygen in the mask are made to compensate for low oxygen at high altitudes to give the passengers something to breathe closer to the 21% of normal air. O2 concentrations at 30,000 feet are only 6%.
You are correct about not wanting the passengers to activate the oxygen generators during a fire.
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"My money is on passengers starting to panic and they wanted them off as fast as possible. "
Yet, ironically, according to my mom's friend, who was on the flight, about half of them grabbed their carry-ons for the trip down the slides.
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I'm just amazed that planes don't have a hazzard containment box of sorts
You wouldn't be so amazed if you read the first quoted paragraph of TFS. You could have done that faster than posting.
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Life imitates art [youtube.com].
Mobile Slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
Completely OT, but why am I getting redirected to mobile.slashdot for this story when my desktop is hardwired?
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Well, obviously Slashdot wants you to use you phone on the flight for this story so that they have a excuse for dupe when this article is duped in a few days..
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Just another slashdot fail. They have cnames set up for categories that change themes and one of the categories has the same name as the mobile site. Yeah, I think that's pathetic too. In fact it's even worse than that; one day none of the cnames were working, only slashdot.org, so I wrote a user script to chop the hostnames off. Much better. I liked it so much I wrote another one to redirect to slashdot.org if one should follow a link into the site from elsewhere to cname.slashdot.org. https://greasyfork.o [greasyfork.org]
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Maybe a cookie expired or something. Just click the link to the full site somewhere at the bottom of the mobile site.
That qualifies for a Whoosh!
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It's not a mobile site -- there is a site per topic.
There are also "science.slashdot.org", "."politics.slashdot.org", "games.slashdot.org", "hardware.slashdot.org", etc.
You can go to one of those sites for only stories within that topic.
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And when a site malfunctions (gives a blank page, or other HTTP error), you can delete the site prefix and load it up. The redirect only happens from the front page to a story page - it doesn't redirect if you're go to a story page directly. Some sites are flaky and go down
Perhaps It is time for plains to have lock boxes (Score:1)
Why did two go to the hospital? (Score:2)
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Ever inhaled the fumes from a burning battery? Non physical injuries aren't sexy so don't often get reported in the news. This is America don't forget, a night at the hospital is more expensive than a night in a RitzCarlton executive suite. .
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You know what else is commonly reported? Incomplete information.
We can guess what happened all we want. But I suspect literally every guess is far more likely than "not getting a hotel and instead choosing a hospital".
I can honestly only summise you've never been to hospital before.
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Caution and lawsuits (Score:2)
If anyone says they are injured, the emergency personnel and the airline will take them to see a doctor right away to a) make sure their injury truly doesn't need treatment and b) document that fact.
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Samsung on fire again? (Score:2)
What do you mean “unknown” device? (Score:5, Informative)
This story has been making the rounds for two days already, and every other article I’ve seen led with the info that it was a Samsung Galaxy A21, as stated by officials. The only reason it’s “unknown” is because The Register rushed the article and hasn’t amended it in the two days since. The MacRumors article from about an hour later includes those details, as does all of the reporting from the next day, such as Android Central’s.
https://www.androidcentral.com... [androidcentral.com]
https://www.macrumors.com/2021... [macrumors.com]
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This story has been making the rounds for two days already, and every other article I’ve seen led with the info that it was a Samsung Galaxy A21, as stated by officials.
Sir, this is Slashdot. If it’s not two days late, short on info, and duped - we want our money back.
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Mod parent up.
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Normally if MacRumors said it was a Samsung my immediate assumption would be it was actually a new model iToy.
Nice travel tip (Score:2)
LiFePO4 (Score:2)
If instead we used Lithium iron phosphate batteries (LiFePO4), this wouldn't be a problem. They don't have thermal runaway. They also don't use cobalt, so that eliminates the problems of obtaining it from questionable regimes. It also last longer. So why isn't it used more often? Because LiCoO2 (the standard battery chemistry used in cellphones and in many other portable devices) has 14% more energy density for its first year after manufacture, which allows cell phone manufacturers to advertise the long tim
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Thats not quite the whole story. Yes, everything you said about LFP batteries is true , however a big downside is that you can fuck up them badly if you discharge them below (according to most sources) 2.5V which doesn't give much of a working voltage range and hence it might only have 80-90% of the energy density of LioN but the usable energy is even lower than that. Having said that I personally think LioN should be dumped ASAP and LFP used instead even if the battery and hence device has to be a bit larg
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Lithium Manganese (LMR) would also be a good choice. They support a high discharge rate and are very difficult to get them to run away (no protection circuit needed). The manufacturers have 2 good choices and one hazardous choice, so guess which one they picked!
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If instead we used Lithium iron phosphate batteries (LiFePO4), this wouldn't be a problem. They don't have thermal runaway.
With Chinese patents being up next year have a feeling we will soon be seeing more of this chemistry make their way into products especially EVs.
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3 replies, all good, wow you guys are making me have renewed faith in Slashdot. Still trying to figure out why my post gets a score of 1, however.
No smoking (Score:1)
Funny thought (Score:2)
It'd be interesting if they can't ID the "smartphone" because it's actually a custom built vaporizer designed to look like a cellphone(probably using the case of one for a disguise). If you can't do it using the cellphone itself, just build it into one of those massive cellphone cases like an otterbox.
Kind of like how there are a few single-shot pistols disguised as the old brick type cell phones. Of course, those would stand out WORSE than an actual gun these days, and modern cellphones are too thin for
Not really a smart phone (Score:2)
Did it not know there is a smoking section?
Smoking Samsung according to Passenger (Score:2)
Fascinating that Slashdot seems to be protecting Samsung here.
According to another source, the firebomb in question was courtesy of a Samsung Galaxy A21.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021... [macrumors.com]
The fact that They have not retracted that information since they published it three days ago strongly indicates that the information is correct.
Censorship on the part of the articleâ(TM)s submitter, or on the part if some /. Editor is totally unacceptable.
The 3 day delay in publishing is also somewhat suspicious.
So why
Not surprising (Score:2)
When a battery technology needs protective circuitry because they are known to explode in this manner, of course we will have incidents like this, and in a wide range of places.
Classrooms, offices, houses, inside vehicles, I've heard it all. The only thing that surprises me is that we don't hear about this more often.
I keep hearing about all of these new safer battery technologies to replace Li-Ion, but I don't hear about any consumer products containing these new batteries, or even a solid proposal for thi
Lets focus on tech not sociopolitical BS (Score:2)
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Well, you're in the minority then. I've enjoyed stories about a city in Iran that shuts the streetlights off for star parties, powering a shelter with a locomotive, analysis of Neanderthal DNA, and the theft (and later partial recovery) of a million pounds of maple syrup from the Canadian Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. More than anything I come for the discussions.
Alliteration Fail! (Score:2)
The errant mobile was also stuffed in a bag to curb its compact conflagration.
Nice try, but they should have gone all in: The malfunctioning mobile was stuffed in a satchel to curb its compact conflagration.
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Alright, who let this critter out of the Fox News studio?
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What?
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Never mind, he spams this in every thread, it's basically copy/paste spam he shits into every other article, most of the time not even remotely related to whatever the topic at hand may be.
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