A new measure forcing passengers to store all their large electronics in the hold may have disastrous consequences, say airline experts – and the only security that measure will provide is financial security to American carriers.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretly sent 10 foreign-owned carriers an “emergency amendment” via the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on Monday, requiring flights inbound to the US from 10 Middle Eastern airports to ban any device larger than a cellphone from carry-on luggage. On Tuesday, the UK announced it was going even further than the US , banning in-cabin electronics on all direct flights from six Middle Eastern countries.

Travelers have been told that they will have to pack such devices in baggage to be checked into the plane’s hold.

But filling the hold of a commercial airliner with the lithium-ion batteries used to power most consumer electronics would create a hazard all its own, according to Robert W Mann Jr, president of the airline industry analysts RW Mann & Company.

Rechargeable batteries are often recalled because they pose a risk of fire – and the kind of fire started by an overheating battery is much harder to extinguish by conventional means.

Battery fires are believed to have downed airplanes in the past, notably a UPS flight out of Dubai which crashed in 2008 with the loss of two crew members. The general civil aviation authority of the UAE blamed the loss of the plane on combustion of batteries in the hold.

Fire suppression systems in the hold of a commercial aircraft – which is inaccessible to the crew during flight – are ineffective against metal fires, and the new regulations may actually increase the risk of fire, said Mann.



In an age of exploding tablets, safe battery storage deeply concerns experts. “On an aircraft, how many [now-prohibited] devices are carried by, let’s say, 300 customers? How many spare batteries? How many batteries charged by unapproved chargers are in the hold?” Mann asked. “It would be harder to detect that and harder to fight an in-flight fire in the hold than it would if a fire occurred in the cabin. Most cabins have fire blankets and extinguishers that are useful against metal fires.”

Fires in jetliner holds are extinguished automatically by halon-gas extinguishers, which are effective only against open flame and useless against overheating metal, according to a report by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

In 2014, the ICAO’s dangerous goods panel issued a report on lithium-ion batteries – the kind of rechargeable batteries most commonly used in portable electronics like laptops, tablets and gaming devices, all of which are affected by the new rule. “[F]ires in flight involving certain types and quantities of lithium metal batteries have the potential to result in an uncontrolled fire leading to a catastrophic failure of the airframe,” the ICAO report said.

The United Nations and the US’s Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) agreed, voting to ban cargo shipments of lithium-ion batteries from passenger jets on the grounds of unacceptable risk. The FAA issued a warning of “catastrophic hull loss due to significant identified dangers associated with the transport of lithium batteries as cargo”.

Mann said that the primary risk of cargo shipments of batteries is posed by the density with which those batteries are packed on a shipping pallet.

Other luggage would probably provide some insulation in the event of a fire in the baggage bins, and many people already check their laptops, but radically increasing the number of batteries in various states of repair in the inaccessible cargo area inevitably increases risk.



DHS also ignores its own precautionary measures with the new rule: Abu Dhabi, one of the affected airports, operates what Mann calls “a state-of-the-art US customs and border preclearance facility” so rigorous that passengers inbound to the US from that airport are cleared by US customs and treated as domestic travelers when they land.



“It’s kind of bizarre that this state-of-the-art facility is judged inadequate to screen electronics. That seems like the primary objective of one these facilities,” said Mann.

Forcing passengers to toss their batteries into the hold poses other problems. “Many of the customers who are inconvenienced by this in the short term won’t have battery endcaps or battery bags to inert them from short-circuiting,” Mann said.

Instead, the regulation will probably simply hurt foreign-owned carriers and drive customers to US carriers in the name of security.

“It seems to create a competitive disadvantage for those carriers flying nonstop from those 10 points,” Mann said. So far, DHS has punted responsibility for implementing the rule to the FAA. The FAA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

All of the airlines affected by the US ban are foreign. The only foreign carrier not affected is Israel’s El Al, which shares its fleet with American Airlines. “A number of parties [among US carriers] have been calling for a reset on some of the Middle East aviation agreements,” Mann said. US carriers contend that state-owned luxury airlines – several of which are affected by the ban – compete unfairly with American carriers, which have reduced passenger amenities steadily for years.

“It will have a competitive effect whether or not that’s the intended result,” Mann said.