Three Airlines Ban Laptop Batteries -- Don't Panic

Sept. 21, 2006 — -- The announcement today that Virgin Atlantic Airlines is requiring its passengers to remove the batteries from certain Dell and Apple laptop computers has already made its way around the world in a modern electronic form of the old kid's game -- Gossip.

Gossip, and several more modern equivalents, means starting a simple message at one end of a long line of participants, whispering the message in the adjacent ear and requiring the recipient to quickly whisper the closest equivalent to the next person, and so on.

What usually emerges from the public announcement of the last person in the chain bears no resemblance to the original message, and neither does the "word," currently creating a collective shudder among those of us who are all but surgically attached to our laptops, bear any resemblance to reality. ("Wait! Wait! You can't take my laptop away! The hard drive contains my BRAIN!")

Relax. What Virgin did -- following the same move by Qantas and Korean Air -- is just lean to the side of caution in dealing with a specific problem with a specific type of laptop battery used in certain models of Dell and Apple computers built between 2003 and 2006.

The problem is essentially minor in that the darn things have a disturbing tendency to catch on fire while you're otherwise engaged in, er, computing. Therefore, it seemed to Virgin's safety folks that allowing a cabinful of these batteries to be used in flight might fall just a hair or two outside the boundaries of conservative airborne operations.

Now, it is true that the average individual sharp enough to be using a laptop in flight should certainly be aware at a rather early stage that his or her lap is on fire, but what if said passenger is sleeping? Worse, what if five or more of the already-recalled batteries decide to combust simultaneously (and at the same time) in the same airborne cabin?

The resulting bother to the flight attendants in having to race around the cabin indecorously using fire extinguishers to put out overheated passengers while ruining their computers is, quite frankly, inconsistent with proper British decorum.