point taken. Good explanation.
In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become “jammed in a Business Class seat” and had “already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat’s movements” when the flight diverted. Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad.
The decision to divert was taken “to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating,” the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control.
Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed, as they can lead to thermal runaway — a chain reaction that causes the battery to overheat, possibly catching fire or exploding.
An over-reaction?
Kinda hard to say. A fire in the cabin is one of those nightmare scenarios. A lithium battery fire in a place you can’t practically get to is a different more exotic nightmare.
If somebody is sitting in their seat watching a vid on their tablet and it starts smoking, there are procedures & equipment to grab it & contain the fire before it sets the seats or people or clothes or carpet or whatever else on fire.
If this seat was one of those fancy lie flat pod thingies, you’d be kindling a fire in a place you can’t reach. You might be able to pour a dribble of liquid onto the tablet, but not nearly enough to keep the heat under control. You need to dunk the tablet in a basin for that. Or, per procedures, put it in the fireproof waterproof containment bag and fill that with liquid & close it up.
No amount of fire extinguisher is going to put out the battery fire itself, though it’ll be effective putting out the seat & surrounding area. If you can direct the extinguisher well enough into there. A problem with battery fires is they’re both very hot, and very long lasting. So if they’re in flammable surroundings, they’ll keep rekindling those surroundings long after you’ve used up every fire extinguisher onboard.
For a domestic flight with a continuous stream of diversion airports passing underneath it might have been reasonable to continue to destination keeping a very close eye on the tablet for any signs of trouble. But preparing to launch out over the North Atlantic where for hours you’ll be over an hour from a landing place with a simmering potential fire on your hands.
Not a gamble I’d want to take most days.
Returning to the discussion of the Cessna 310 with the rudder issue that crashed in Florida as originally cited in the post I’m replying to …
As of today the NTSB hasn’t released anything. But I got curious about the control lock provisions of that airplane. Here’s a PDF of somebody’s POH for that model (310R): POH_C310R_1982.pdf.
PDF page 25 POH page 2-10 says there needs to be a placard next to the control lock saying “remove before starting engines”. More interestingly in light of this accident is says there’s a different placard if the airplane has the optional separate rudder lock installed. So we’ve learned two things: there is a cockpit control lock for the ailerons & elevator, and on some airplanes there is a second separate cockpit control lock for the rudder. Cue ominous music.
The preflight inspection procedure and the actual before start checklist both mention “Control lock(s) - removed.” The exterior inspection also mentions removing control surface locks if installed. And the run-up / before takeoff checklist includes ensuring all control surfaces move freely & correctly. So far so ordinary.
Here’s some cockpit pix of various C310s. Several have the typical Cessna gust lock where a pin goes through a hole drilled through the yoke tube, preventing aileron or elevator movement. The pin has a big brightly painted metal flag that gets in the way of the band of switches along the bottom of the pilot’s panel. Making it real hard to power up the electrics or start the engines with that thing in the way. I could not see any evidence of a rudder gust lock in any of these pix. Aviation Photo Search | Airliners.net. Scroll down below the already filled-in search query boxes to see the results.
Of course cockpit photos of generic 310s don’t tell us whether this one has an interior rudder lock, nor whether the airplane had exterior rudder locks either.
I read the Twin Crash Just Out Of Boca Raton(FL, USA) Airport - PPRuNe Forums and that thread has an unusually good signal to noise ratio. Lotta posts from folks with relevant knowledge of the airplane and airport. A headscratcher for sure.
Q: How might one not come home with all of the equipment that the Navy issued you?
A: Be a F/A-18E fighter pilot on the USS Harry S Truman; one got shot down in a friendly fire incident a couple of months ago & today, one being towed went off the elevator when the tug went out of control. D’Oh!
I guess the Houthis can take down fighter jets after all.
How in the frick does a tug get out of control and why aren’t there wheel stops on the elevator?
The news piece says the carrier was “making a hard turn” which to me sounds like it may have tilted the deck or imparted some large lateral momentum when the tow crew were not expecting it. Which one would sort of expect fleet carrier crews to be familiarized with, though.
Props to the report writer for the nice way of phrasing that everyone ran out of the way and no one was as dumb as to try to hold on to the large rolling objects: “Sailors towing the aircraft took immediate action to move clear of the aircraft before it fell overboard”
My dad was a USMC aircraft mechanic on the Midway around 1950. They had F4U Corsairs and F8F Panthers aboard. Dad was a “plane captain” on the F4Us. Which meant he “owned” one particular airplane and was responsible for all its care and feeding.
Back in those days when airplanes were towed the plane captain was in the cockpit to use the plane’s wheel brakes if necessary. One nasty night in the North Atlantic he and his plane almost got pushed overboard by a tug. He just barely got the plane stopped before it went over the side. The odds on a rescue had he gone in the drink were essentially zero.
I was born a few years later, so had that story ended differently I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. :yikes:
Wow!!
Yes, WOW.
I’m wondering why there isn’t a 2 foot tall barrier capable of arresting the departure of errant hanger planes.
Introducing … the plane of the future! And the plane of the future is an oddly retro-looking four-engine prop job that would not have looked out of place in 1950. The difference is that each propeller is powered by a 2 megawatt electric motor, and the electricity comes from hydrogen fuel cells.
This is Airbus’s answer to the challenge of zero net emissions passenger flight. They had previously been working on a hydrogen-powered jet, but decided that this is a more practical first step. It looks somewhat like the big brother of the De Havilland Canada Dash 8, a twin-engine turboprop first introduced in 1984. Interestingly, De Havilland is also working on a hydrogen-electric version of the Dash 8.
More a 4-engine ATR-72. Airbus being a major partner in the ATR consortium.
But yeah, alternative fuels and electric motors instead of turbines will be an evolution from Cessna Caravan-sized projects to these regional turboprop equivalents, to eventually machines of RJ-size & speed, etc.
Assuming of course we continue to to make technological progress while our societies and economies hold together.
It’s remarkable how similar the ATR-72 is to the Dash 8. You can hardly tell them apart. I guess that’s what happens when you have very similar design goals. Either that or – my preferred theory – is that some nefarious Italian or Frenchman stole De Havilland’s design plans! 
In a further amazing coincidence, both aircraft have been produced in almost exactly the same numbers – IIRC, just over 1,230 each across all variants.
What are the rules for when a plane bonks your ball out of the way?
Heck of a landing, though. I don’t think there was even a prop strike.
When I was living in L.A., a Cessna (I don’t remember which model – may have been a 210) made an emergency landing on a golf course. The picture on the news showed golfers playing through, with the plane in the background.
Preliminary report from NTSB on the Rob Holland aerobatic aircraft accident.
It appears that a custom modification was done to the elevator counterweights, with a removable plug to access and adjust the weights for different routines.
One of the plugs appears to have come unscrewed, and jammed the elevator and stabilizer on one side, resulting in loss of control while landing.
That’s incredibly bad luck, a few more seconds and the aircraft would have been safely on the ground.
RIP, a great talent lost.
https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/200061/pdf
It sounds like he was doing a fly-by when it happened.
Great cite.
At about 1 minute into the vid we see a series of stills of the airplane deploying the ballistic chute from a couple hundred feet above the water. We also see that was much too low an altitude for the chute to fully blossom and the penduluming to settle out before impact. The pilot may well have had a worse impact with the water under the chute than if he’d simply flown the ditching himself.
What we don’t know is whether he’d been cruising at just a couple hundred feet above the water or he’d been at much higher altitude, then had the failure, then glided down to low altitude, then had a change of heart/mind and chose to deploy the chute well outside of desired parameters.