The last place you want a lithium battery fire giving off intense heat and toxic smoke is in a passenger plane at 35,000ft
An award-winning AvSax fire containment bag now on board 17,000 passenger aircraft worldwide
Environmental Defence Systems managing director Richard Bailey
The potential danger of lithium battery fires on board aircraft has been graphically highlighted when a passenger plane bound for the USA was diverted to Ireland.
The United Airlines plane with 150 people on board was flying from Zurich in Switzerland to Chicago when a passenger’s laptop became hopelessly jammed in a seat.
The plane was already around 500 miles into crossing the Atlantic when the pilots made the decision to turn round and make an emergency landing at Shannon in Ireland on Sunday, May 19, 2024.
This is because if they had tried to free the laptop the lithium batteries inside could have potentially burst into flames or even exploded.
As it was, after it landed engineers could only get to it by removing a panel from the cargo hold below so if the battery had already suffered damage being crushed by the seat, the results could have been catastrophic.
In a statement to the media United Airlines confirmed: “United flight 12 from Zurich to Chicago landed safely in Shannon to address a potential safety risk caused by a laptop being stuck in an inaccessible location.”
The time spent diverting meant that the crew were over their flying hours and so the passengers were put up in a hotel overnight and the flight continued the next day.
These kinds of incidents are the reason almost 17,000 aircraft worldwide are equipped with AvSax lithium fire mitigation bags devised by British company Environmental Defence Systems Ltd, based in Huddersfield, Yorkshire.
Its managing director, Richard Bailey, said: “This is a very unusual incident and throughout it the airline company put the safety of passengers right at the forefront of their minds.
“I would guess there was the chance the laptop had already been damaged when it became stuck which meant there was the possibility its lithium batteries could have gone into thermal runaway at any time.”
Thermal runaway is a rapid and uncontrolled chemical reaction within the battery that causes the internal temperature to rise.
When one cell in a battery overheats it can produce enough heat - up to 900°C (1652°F) - to make adjacent cells overheat. This can cause a lithium battery fire to flare repeatedly which is why AvSax fire and smoke mitigation bags are needed. They are made from military grade material so even if they did explode, the bag would contain it.
Environmental Defence Systems Ltd was awarded the highest accolade any UK business can get, the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, for innovation for the AvSax.
There have been 483 verified lithium battery incidents on US aircraft or planes in US airspace between March 2006 and April 2024, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Of these, 201 involved battery packs, 100 were caused by vapes or e-cigarettes, 63 were mobile phones, 59 laptops and the rest from other personal electronic devices.
The FAA is the only flight regulatory organisation in the world that releases information about lithium battery incidents so many more will have happened that have never been made public.
For more information on AvSax go to https://avsax.com/
