Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Phone Catches Fire on Southwest Plane (theverge.com) 266
After learning about faulty battery issues in its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, Samsung said it will offer its existing customers a safe, replacement unit. It appears the replacement unit also suffers from the same issue. Jordan Golson, reporting for The Verge: Southwest Airlines flight 944 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate because of a smoking Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. All passengers and crew exited the plane via the main cabin door and no injuries were reported, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson told The Verge. More worryingly, the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier today and he confirmed that he had picked up the new phone at an AT&T store on September 21st. A photograph of the box shows the black square symbol that indicates a replacement Note 7 and Green said it had a green battery icon.A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines said, "prior to the Southwest Airlines Flight 994 departing from Louisville for Baltimore, a customer reported smoke emitting from an electronic device. All customers and crew deplaned safely via the main cabin door. Customers will be accommodated on other Southwest flights to their final destinations. Safety is always our top priority at Southwest and we encourage our customers to comply with the FAA Pack Safe Guidelines."
pffft (Score:5, Funny)
just put it out with one of the snakes.
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Does Samuel Jackson use a Note 7?
Samsung marketing is on fire (Score:5, Funny)
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True story: I saw a sign at San Francisco International Airport that specifically said Galaxy Note 7 phones were banned from all flights. I wish I had taken a photo.
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Schipol Amsterdam is constantly putting it over the loudspeaker in the terminal. Mind you they are always willing to show off Dutch directness with their loudspeaker: "Passenger Jones you are delaying your flight, if you do not report to the gate in 5 minutes we will remove your baggage from the plane."
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Funny story from someone who has lived in many places in the world. The Americans are openly welcoming and will love to show you their city and take you to all the great places to eat. The Australians similarly will take you camping, joke about drop-bears, and get you involved straight away in backyard BBQs. Most people around the world will do something welcoming like help you speak the language, give you tips to get settled in, and the like.
Moving to the Netherlands was the first time I have experienced m
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Also, if global warming projections are true, I'd prefer to live in a country with the worlds best hydro-engineers, ha!
You probably should pick a country where more of it is above the current sea level.
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I saw a similar on Tokyo a few weeks ago. It did mention that fixed ones were okay though.
One smoking phone isn't evidence of much though. We have had the odd smoking iPhone 7 as well. Any product where there are a very large number of units in the field using large lithium batteries in unknown conditions (maybe the owner damaged it or submerged it beyond the manufacturer's limits) is going to have a few spectacular failures. It's certainly nothing like the multiple widespread failures they were seeing prev
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It's not US. I was on an Iberian Express flight from Madrid and they specifically called out Galaxy Note 7s in the terminals at Madrid and Amsterdam, as well as in the plane itself.
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?No comprendo? (Score:2)
What?
One smoking phone battery and:
* The plane is evacuated.
* The flight is cancelled.
What?
How would it not be enough to fling the phone out the door and carry on?
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that'd be too easy and not nearly disruptive enough. You must be new to air travel in the united states.
Re:?No comprendo? (Score:4, Informative)
I remember a story about a guy that had his ipod fall into the airplane toilet and they deplaned and went to interrogating people.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
Re:?No comprendo? (Score:5, Funny)
That must have created quite the shit storm.
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As long as they Flush out the culprit!
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Perhaps the airline wanted to do a careful analysis of the event and possible repercussions thereof since they have a 100 million dollar plane and a hundred or so human lives hanging on a successful flight.
Sometimes reality isn't the first thing that shows up.
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Please. That 737-700 probably was only $50m or $60m. They could have risked it.
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They can merely write it off on next years taxes...
Re:?No comprendo? (Score:5, Funny)
Try to envision a world in which the FAA would write a regulation including the phrase "but if it's just a SMALL fire, then heck, just toss it out the door and carry on".
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Such a world would be... business as usual:
They would create an entire new government entity: Federal Aviation Fire Administration or FAFA; to define the exact definition of a federal fire, it's acceptable heat limits for a given altitude, create the Approved Combustible Items List (ACIL), nominate a new cabinet level position, and double the budget for the FAA to allow for US Phone Marshals to be on all flights.
Read the article (Score:5, Informative)
The phone was putting out a goodly amount of smoke, the smell of which would have to be professionally cleaned from the whole plane or most of the people in the SEALED CABIN would have gotten really sick from it.
Not to mention the carpet AND subfloor were charred, further contributing to residual smell and smoke.
Also how exactly would *you* have chucked it out the "door" - the emergency door which means the plane is not flying anywhere anyway? What door exactly????
What no-one ever told you is the magic smoke is also toxic...
Re:?No comprendo? (Score:5, Insightful)
The smoke is potentially pretty toxic, the device gets extremely hot (cannot be handled without high-temp gloves) and you cannot put out a lithium fire. You have to let it burn, maybe put sand on it. Hence removing it without making the problem worse is tricky. On the other hand, you can get the passengers out fast (airplanes are designed for that) and that will put everyone in a safe situation reliably. Hence the decision to evacuate is the only right choice here.
Re:?No comprendo? (Score:5, Informative)
you cannot put out a lithium fire
You're wrong. The FAA produced a video showing several methods of extinguishing lithium battery fires [youtube.com] ranked in order of effectiveness using the things available onboard the aircraft.
there is this "thing" about fluids and aluminum (Score:2)
that airplanes avoid. seems they don't want the seams and rivets to corrode, for some silly reason.
you can pull a car over and get out if it starts falling apart. not so an airliner. no curb.
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Hahahaha, no. They are assuming that only some (one) cell burns and then they can prevent the others from catching fire. And they induce by external heat, not by in-cell problems.
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Man that is a long video. The methods are:
- water
- Halon 1211 fire extinguisher alone
Also:
- don't use ice
- don't try and smother it
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Overreaction is a key component
I set a fire in the backseat of your car, I dare you to drive ten more miles without "overreacting" to the smoke filling the car and getting out...
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Probably because a plane featuring air with a not-insignificant amount of smoke from a chemical fire isn't a very good idea for your passengers.
And I'm sure there's some FAA regulation about littering on the runway from an open hatch on a fucking 737.
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"FOD is bad...m'kay?"
-- if Mr. Mackey were a maintainer, not a counselor
The Last Crusade (Score:2)
I had a flash back of Indiana Jones throwing a poor Nazi out of a blimp... saying "No ticket!"
Just replace with "He had a Note 7"
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If they were real lucky, they could have tossed it out and hit a refueling truck. With any luck they would have gotten enough of a fire going to knock out a couple of planes and maybe destroy a terminal wing in the process.
I do kind of wonder if maybe planes shouldn't have a containment vessel on the plane, some kind of portable cylinder that something dangerous could be thrown into that could be sealed tight.
I don't know what you'd make it out of, maybe some kind of steel cylinder with a ceramic liner. I
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Well, this is what happens when you take safety very, very seriously. You don't leave any room for judgment on the people in the field. The rules probably say: in case of fire, EVACUATE THE PLANE. They don't say, in case of fire, check to see whether it's a sufficiently big one and then evacuate the plane, although that does accord better with common sense.
You could do the common sense thing and tell the crew, "use your best judgment". But if you're smart you have your actuaries look over the relative c
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How would it not be enough to fling the phone out the door and carry on?
Out the door? You mean where there's potentially a refuelling truck at work?
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Re:?No comprendo? (Score:5, Informative)
Toxic gas gets released in a closed environment, a fire starts on a plane, and you think it's abnormal that the smoke be cleared out before a 100 million dollar plane and hundreds of lives are risked?
Nice anecdote grandpa. Since your time, we invented this idea of "statistics" and "collecting data". Fact is, more than 6,000 kids died in the eight years before lawn darts were banned. Now, is it worth banning just to save 763 lives a year? That's a judgement call. But it's not "this activity is perfectly safe, overreaching 'crats." Fun sidenote, apparently the most common cause of injury wasn't among the contestants, but because someone overthrew it into someone else's yard.
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Nice anecdote grandpa. Since your time, we invented this idea of "statistics" and "collecting data". Fact is, more than 6,000 kids died in the eight years before lawn darts were banned. Now, is it worth banning just to save 763 lives a year? That's a judgement call. But it's not "this activity is perfectly safe, overreaching 'crats." Fun sidenote, apparently the most common cause of injury wasn't among the contestants, but because someone overthrew it into someone else's yard.
Well I'm 44 now... imma assume you're 24 and everything going on today looks normal and peachy to you. But in 20 years when you're my age you're gonna look around in disgust and say "WTF happened, things used to be so much better when I was young"
Re:?No comprendo? (Score:5, Informative)
Fact is, more than 6,000 kids died in the eight years before lawn darts were banned.
Numbers like those would have raised much greater societal outrage, not to mention media coverage. Googling for the real numbers shows that 6100 people of all ages went to the hospital due to lawn dart injuries during those eight years. About three-quarters of those people were kids, and of those there were 3 deaths. That's still a huge concern, but nowhere near thousands of deaths.
Re:?No comprendo? (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is they don't make 'em like they used to.
You see, older model Adult Replacement Units (sometimes called children), were made in the good old US of A, and were more durable thanks to the efforts of hard working, patriotic, flag waving union workers. These models were able to tolerate lower levels of caution without voiding the warranty. The new models being constructed today are all imported, cheaply made and have limited warranties. Greater caution is required with these updated units. It's comparable to mobile phones: old brick phones were nearly indestructible, nowadays, newfangled smarty-pants phones need helmets to protect there sensitive innards.
Like I said, the new models just aren't as good as they used to be. ;)
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Second hand smoke has not been proven to be harmful outside the state of California, or while flying over a "Red" state.
NTSB will now investigate (Score:2)
Samsung won't be able to confiscate and hide the phone now. It will go straight to the NTSB.
What's next? (Score:2)
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It's not the toilet I am worried about. It's the guy with a Samsung Top Loading Washer under his coat I'd be more concerned about.
New galaxy 7 owner... (Score:2)
Owner: New phone who d-OH GOD IT'S ON FIRE!
Friend: Frank? I told you not to sleep with that floozy but nooOOOooo. Well now you got the herp.
Owner: IT'S MELTING MY FLESH!
Friend: Welcome to the club, buddy.
Aren't flights.... (Score:2)
non-smoking now?
Quite a spectacular PR disaster for Samsung ... (Score:3)
I'm not really interested in Samsung phones - I've always thought them thoroughly lacking in some important areas (design, UI) - but I have to say this whole batteries-on-fire thing is some spectacular PR disaster for the only true competitor to Apples iPhone line.
Kinda makes me feel sorry for this company. AFAIHH the entire nation of South Korea is suffering with them.
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We need a 21st century crash axe (Score:2)
All commercial aircraft should have a strengthened, heat-sinked, airtight metal pouch that can be used to snuff out burning mobile devices when lithium batteries go rogue.
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on commercial aircraft!
Or at least it is a good argument for removable batteries... Think of one of these in checked baggage!
Re: On the plus side, phones soon not to be allowe (Score:2)
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Re:The problem is the battery itself (Score:4, Insightful)
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Correction: "That's what Google *Beta* users do!
Re:The problem is the battery itself (Score:5, Informative)
Stresses the battery, which reacts differently due to the reduced cabin pressure at higher elevation.
Basic physics. Or at least it was during my Engineering Physics courses this year.
From TFS:
Southwest Airlines flight 944 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate ...
Basic reading. Spend more time in those classes. :-)
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Yes but did he board the plane there, or was he already on board? If the latter then the phone just got done experiencing a pressure cycle from a flight.
Re:The problem is the battery itself (Score:4, Informative)
If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd have seen the part where it said "Green said that he had powered down the phone as requested by the flight crew." Flight crews don't ask you to power down your phone after the flight is over.
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I see smore problems for Samsung coming soon.
Re:The problem is the battery itself (Score:4, Interesting)
As most smartphone batteries can handle that, I suspect problem with the design itself (like battery-unfriendly power regulators or the battery being heated-up by some other device close to it or a general departure from best-practices observed so far) and, and that is what makes this pretty bad, faulty issue identification. It may just be that the batteries are, in principle, fine. Or that the replacement-batteries have the same issue. Or, as you suspect, a mismatch between the battery and its use, and inadequate testing to compound the error.
It may, of course, be also be a decision by "managers" to ignore concerns of engineers and to push this thing, and then the replacements, out the door fast.
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The phone had been turned off, and the plane hadn't departed yet. Also, the user had only used wireless charging previously (per the article).
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Samsung may have screwed up but:
> So, Samsung has a power-hog design/OS, and as a result, has had to put in nearly double the battery as the iPhone.
This is asinine.
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Setting aside for the moment that the plane wasn't yet pressurized since it was still sitting at the gate, cabin pressure at cruising altitude is roughly equivalent to 8,000 ft or 2,400 m (it's commonly compared to the air pressure in Denver, even though Denver sits a bit lower than that). If Samsung hadn't tested their phone to deal with pressures like that, then the phone would be unusuable in a whole lot of major cities that sit at high altitude [wikipedia.org], mostly affecting Mexico and South America, but with a few
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If only the battery were replaceable, without needing to take apart the whole phone to replace it... it would have cost Samsung a lot less to replace just the battery instead of the whole phone. Too bad.
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No, replaceable batteries aren't the solution. They would probably make the situation worse, in fact. If the battery were replaceable, end users would be replacing them with the cheapest Chinese gray-market batteries they could find, made from lithium ore containing higher-than-permitted levels of lead, melamine, white phosphorus, and plutonium.
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never had a cheap chinese battery self-ignite
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Stresses the battery, which reacts differently due to the reduced cabin pressure at higher elevation.
Nothing to do with that, the plane hadn't even taken off.
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Let’s be real for a second though There are certainly flights that are longer than the 8-10 hours you can get from a pair of BT headphones, but not *that* many people fly that far regularly nor are able to listen to music for the entire flight. I’d imagine sleep is a common alternative to music listening.
If you manage to kill your BT headphones, unplug the phone & switch to wired for a while. You’ll get another 20+ hours of music, especially with the cell radio turned off. Charge y
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So you're telling people they should carry two pairs of headphones around? That's annoying.
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My bluetooth headphones have a battery life of 30+ hours.
I've never put them to the limit though, because bluetooth audio is shit, and they can be optionally wired.
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Joke's on him, as airplane travel is one of the times I need both the headphone jack and charge port at the same time. When you have nothing better to do but play with your phone and listen to music for several hours straight, you're going to need to charge.
I vaguely recall a Samsung ad about how useful replaceable batteries are in that scenario as well, but they seem to have forgotten about that...
Joke's on you mindless AC. Do some research first, next time.
Here's One of the MANY options [belkin.com] for wireless charging while headphoning with standard headphones for Lightning-equipped devices. Here's another one for $11 [amazon.com] (I'm sure it's not MFi-certified like the Belkin is; but hey...).
Oh, and that search took 1 second on Google, and 2 seconds and one scroll-wheel-flick on Amazon.
Hatetard.
Re:Astrotrufing anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
We all know there's workarounds, but they're clunky. It's annoying that my iPhone 7 is more cumbersome to do the things just worked out of the box with my iPhone 6, yes I know I can get bluetooth headphones, which I did but on a long haul flight they don't last and don't work in airplane mode anyway. So now I need another set of headphones and a headphone+charge adapter.
That's not the sort of regression in user experience I'm used to with Apple's products. The other issue with it is the inconsistency, the lightning port isn't available on any Mac so the lightning-only headphones they ship with the iPhone (without any lightning to 3.5mm adapter) don't even work with my other Apple products.
Now I'm sure you'll leap to their defence with all the possible workarounds but the fact is the user experience is now worse, this is a downgrade, not an upgrade and usually Apple handles these things so well so this is disappointing but it's ok it's an annoyance and you can admit that.
Re:How often (Score:5, Insightful)
do people have cameras ready, and immediately photograph something that caught fire, and the box it came in which was curiously brought along on the flight, for immediate publishing on the Internet? It seems as if the whole idea was to create even more bad press for the biggest foreign competitor in the U.S. phone market.
You must be new here. Everywhere I've gone in the past couple of years there have been cell phone cameras out and recording for anything remotely out of the ordinary and usually for perfectly mundane events (getting on a plane). The odds of any event in the US (and probably Europe and most parts of Asia) being photographed and / or videoed is getting awfully close to 1 these days.
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No idea. Not that it is difficult to drill a small hole in the case over the battery and then jab a needle into it to set it off. With a few trial-runs you may even be able to make sure the evidence burns up completely.
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Well, if this guy set his phone off by intent, and they can prove that, he may go to prison for a few years. This whole thing is suspicious. Kind of like the Chinese person that claimed the phone also destroyed his MacBook.
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Well, the picture of the burnt phone is on the kind of carpet and what looks to be the attachment point for a seat on a plane.
The picture of the box appears to be on a painted wood surface, perhaps the black-brown veneer that Ikea puts on desks. The box was probably nowhere near the plane, but provided to the journalist so he could compare serial numbers to see if this was indeed a "replacement" or "original" Note 7.
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Somehow Apple is to blame for all of this, I can feel it in my Android phone.
The Farce is strong with this one...
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May the Farce be with you... always.
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So the iPhone 7 ALSO has an explosive hidden feature?
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Re:Sarcastic comment... (Score:5, Funny)
If Steve Ballmer were Samsung CEO, he would have personally ripped each and every airline seat out and thrown every last one of them at the customer with the smoking phone.
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But Ballmer got fired for running another phone company into the ground.
Perhaps he didn't throw enough chairs at people.
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minus the phone part, and about $15B, and 25000 jobs.
They're now basically a SaaS company, with a side of Iaas.
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Apple told me that Ballmer was not throwing the chairs right.
It's a matter of quality experience over quantity.
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If Jobs were Samsung CEO, he would have personally thrown somebody out a fricking window over this.
Apple certainly has experience with it. Their exploding laptop batteries date from around 2004 and were still exploding in 2013.
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Parkways are where you drive and driveways are where you park.
Deplane [merriam-webster.com] is in the dictionary and is a real word, despite your unfamiliarity with it.
English isn't all that logical, so stop making an idiot yourself by pretending that it is and complaining when you see a word you don't agree with.
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"prefix 1. removal of or from something specified: deforest, dethrone"
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You get out of a car. You get off of a train or a boat, or a hot air balloon. What's wrong with those? Or should we now start expecting "decar" or "detrain"? "Dehotairballoon"?
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" 3. departure from: decamp"
I've definitely heard that one used quite a lot, including in periods from long before there were any planes around.
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You can argue about the original meaning i suppose, but it's had those other meanings for a long time. I think you're going to have a tough time un-debarning that horse.
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You don't need a Slashdot account. Rent an Anonymous Coward for a small fee.
I couldn't pass that one up. ;)