Notebooks on planes ban sends message to manufacturers

Stan Beer
Monday, 18 September 2006 20:05

Opinion and Analysis

In these days of heightened security, airline travellers already resent having to remove their notebook computers from their cases for inspection before boarding even though most concede it's necessary. However, not being able to use the notebook during flights goes beyond the pale.

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No-one can blame airlines, such as Virgin Atlantic, QANTAS, and others from forcing passengers to remove batteries from Dell and Apple notebooks, when there have been battery recalls and reports of batteries catching fire. In fact, the airlines have been pretty lenient considering the publicity and issues surrounding certain types of Lithium Ion batteries.

The last thing both the airline industry and passengers want to see is a blanket ban on notebooks on planes. Thus, notebook and battery manufacturers need to get together and take urgent action.

Lithium Ion battery technology promises to be far and away the most important storage breakthrough in the past decade. It can scale all the way from portable music players and cameras to electric powered sports cars.

However, some types of Lithium Ion batteries, such as those that use Cobalt Oxide in their manufacturing process, can dangerously overheat if there's a battery short. This is clearly not an acceptable risk to notebook owners, to airlines or air travellers in general.

There are alternative Lithium Ion technologies that do not use Cobalt Oxide, such as those using non-volatile Iron Phosphate instead. While they sacrifice a fair percentage in storage capacity, around 25% less, they will not overheat or burst into flames - and they still outperform the previous non-Lithium battery solutions by a country mile.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm prepared to accept a 25% cut in battery storage capacity if it means the airlines will let me take my notebook on the plane with me and use it if a powerpoint isn't available.

Meanwhile, if someone at Sony and the other battery manufacturers who still use Cobalt Oxide because of the superior storage characteristics of the batteries can come up with a way to ensure that what they're putting in our notebooks is 100% disaster proof then I'm sure we're all ears.