Point of sale terminal battery on AS 17 catches fire

Replacement aircraft?

There must be more to the story than what we are hearing here. Just did some checking online.

Found this at Buffalo News:

"Alaska Airlines 17 had left Newark Liberty International Airport shortly before 7 a.m. Monday. While airborne, a credit card reader caught fire and was dropped into a galley trash receptacle, where the fire was extinguished."

this is the original plane i think, to get another plane there from SEA, it seems like a 12:28pm departure is too early...the OP was talking about having a 7 or 8pm arrival into SEA.

here is the rescue flight:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/A...645Z/KSEA/KBUF

do they have MX base in GEG that they would be sending it to?

Or, fly short so they didn't have to load more fuel in BUF?

OMG that pizza was pretty bad/doughy and I ate a lot of Papa John's in college. Feel bad for the vegetarians, all the sandwiches and pizzas had meat.


The pilot did say we were overweight when we landed and that would require inspection. Also since they used the fire extinguisher and AS doesn't have ANY presence in BUF, they didn't have the equipment to replace the extinguisher?


Thanks for the rescue flight link (how does one find this sort of thing for my future knowledge?)! Now I can park my butt in the AA lounge and not wander over every two hours to check on the rescue arrival.

Wow, kudos to AS for being proactive. Just got this email:

Aircraft would have most likely been over max landing weight and that in itself requires an overweight landing inspection. Top it off that a fire extinguisher was used and don't believe there is MEL relief to allow the airplane to continue without it.
Just a guess but also on the rescue flight inbound is AS personnel (crew, mechanics, and possibly CSA/management). Crew is probably deadhead but are still on-duty in the eyes of the FAA and so they probably still have duty time to fly but only make it to GEG where another crew can be ferried in easily to finish the flight. Mechanics will probably replace extinguisher, do some general checks that are just enough to maintenance ferry.

is the original plane you arrived on now gone? or was it parked on the apron in a place that you can't see whether or not it left? were you deplaned with a jetbridge or on stairs and then walked/bussed to terminal?

Not sure since I'm not sitting at the gate, but would not be surprised if it is gone. They removed checked baggage and placed in "secured storage" as soon as we landed.

After landing (which took longer than usual to slow down to taxiing speed), we waited on the tarmac for the firefighters, etc. to board the plane (via ladders to the emergency exit). They inspected, decided it was ok, then we waited some more for a gate to open up.

We waited another 30 min or so for crew to unload enough baggage and/or fuel and then they let us off 5 rows at a time (because they said otherwise we might risk tipping the plane off balance).

We deplaned on a standard jetway at a normal gate.

Be glad USdbaAA decided to preserve that lounge (for the time being)!

Nice service recovery indeed. Brownie points for AS.

You should ask if you can get a better pizza... or maybe some (wait for it) BUF wings.

i'll speculate that the original crew flew the original plane to GEG after o/w inspection, that is where they will timeout, and another crew will move the plane back to SEA. or they are doing the MX at GEG for some reason. on the rescue inbound there will be an extra set of pilots to fly the new bird back, the FAs will deadhead out, and then work the flight back. perhaps they will bring a CSR or two as well.

I would *really* not want to be that card reader/battery sled supplier right now.

Lithium-Ion batteries are one of the few things in this world where price and quality are nearly perfectly positively correlated AND a failure can be quite literally catastrophic.

The only saving grace is that it was a small battery that cooked off - I'm fairly confident in stating that the entire complement of extinguishers on a narrowbody aircraft don't have the capacity to completely extinguish a gaming-laptop-sized battery that is actually aflame and not just smoking.

Seattle Times just posted:
The card reader was a new device recently introduced on Alaska aircraft. The devices are now being removed and inspected.

Yeah, and wasn't the FAA paying extra attention to Lithium-Ion batteries just this past week?

They are iPhone 6 pluses that are docked into a card reader (like Square, but bigger).

It overheated and started smoking while it was in the galley, and the crew chose to stop the smoke with a fire extinguisher. There were no flames at any point.

I believe this -- I just wrote fire at first because one of the pax near me was waiting for the bathroom when it happened and that's what he told the nearby pax when he got back to his seat. He didn't seem particularly freaked out and I didn't even see smoke (even at the back of the plane), so I figured the attendants likely had/would have it under control.

This is, at best, a near miss. The difference between a Li+ battery that is smoking and one that is about to release thermal and chemical energy equal to 10X its weight in gasoline is truly the smallest of margins. There is *no* thermal runaway condition in a lithium battery that is minor in any way, and had it actually caught fire, we would presumably be discussing a very different outcome for the flight, as discharging every fire extinguisher onboard a 737 would not extinguish most Li+ battery fires.

The problem is (rarely) the OEM batteries in the device itself. The problem is the engineering quality of the "sleds", where who knows what brand of battery was used, or if the supply chain of the entire battery subsystem was legit.

Moral to the story: where there is "smoke", the risk of fire rapidly approaches 100%, and there is very little chance of successfully quenching a lithium battery full-on fire in the passenger compartment while at altitude.