With apologies if this is an impertinent lay person's stupid question on a bulletin board of professionals, may I follow my own posting in the light of wanabee777's posting and the truly alarming video with it?
What exactly is the basis of the commercial aviation industry's policy on lithium batteries?
I have not done a detailed study of the startling results of the google I did, and I don't know how many aircraft were actually destroyed or written off as beyond economic repair or if there has been any loss of life, but there is now quite a string of incidents caused by lithium battery fires. I assume that such an incident in the air must be a matter of the greatest imaginable danger especially if unnoticed, or if attempts to extinguish the fire failed.
There must be hundreds of lithium batteries on many a/c. I doubt whether more than a small fraction in carry-on luggage are checked for their integrity by the security services, eg, by asking passengers to switch on their laptops; and I doubt whether more than an even tinier fraction of the passengers are aware of a hazard (errh.... sorry, that's a dreadful sentence but I'm sure that even pilots can decode that epistemological tapeworm!).
It is my understanding that the impressive safety record of air travel is based on designing and implementing suitable protocols and reactions as rapidly as possible in the light of experience. Even a single instance of danger which has occurred for other reasons (eg, component failure) has been met swiftly by an appropriate remedy within the industry to stop it from recurring, yet the numbers here are mounting in what seems to be silence.
Is it the answer that the IT and aviation industries are now so colossal, interlinked and important that it's more economical to pay insurance policies and hold thumbs?
Or am I succumbing to senile insecurity?