US bans spare lithium batteries from checked bags

December 31, 2007, 01:18 PM —  IDG News Service — 

New rules will go into effect on Jan. 1 that prohibit air
passengers in the U.S. from carrying spare lithium batteries in their checked
baggage.

The new rules, announced Friday by the U.S. Department of Transport, are designed
to reduce the risk of fires in aircraft. Lithium batteries have been identified
as a possible cause of several aircraft fires.

Passengers will still be able to carry lithium batteries in checked bags if
they are installed in a device like a laptop or digital camera. But loose batteries
will need to be put in a plastic bag and carried on the plane as hand luggage,
the DOT said.

The rules also limit each passenger to two "extended-life" lithium
batteries. These are larger batteries with more than 8 grams of equivalent lithium
content, examples of which are pictured in the DOT's statement.

The rules are also described at the SafeTravel.dot.gov Web site.

In February 2006 a United Parcel Service flight landed at Philidelphia International
Airport after the crew detected a fire in its cargo. The National Transportation
Safety Board said later that it found several burned out laptop batteries on
the plane, and could not rule them out as a possible cause of the fire.

Lithium batteries are a fire hazzard because of the heat they can generate
when they are damaged or suffer a short circuit, the NTSB said at a hearing about
the Philidelphia incident last July.

"Several lithium battery incidents have occurred in recent years, including
a lithium-ion battery fire that occurred less than two months ago on an airplane
in Chicago," the NTSB said.

Several big makers of laptops and cell phones, including Dell and Nokia, have
recalled batteries recently because of flaws that created a potential fire hazzard.

IDG News Service

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly

claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century

pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?

sjvn
64-bits of protection?

jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith

mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace