Originally Posted by tyberius

You have no clue about electricity, circuit breakers, and fuses. Nor do you have any clue about CPAP and "power drain." You are not the spokesman on the topic of aircraft safety because you don't know what you are talking about.



Have you ever blown a circuit breaker in your house? Put in one light bulb too many, pop, it goes off. Your house doesn't "almost burn down" or explode. It was not an "emergency situation." It is a failsafe. It is not a disaster when one of these is engaged.

And they are there, right in the socket, on these.

The airline is not searching passengers for laptops that draw more than the mandated wattage available at the outlet. There are no instructions for *anything*. Basically if you plug *anything* into the socket that draws more power than the socket can provide, pop, off goes your breaker.

Same way as it works in any socket in your house that is breaker equipped. Like sockets that may be in the washroom in case you drop your hair dryer into the bathtub. When it shorts out and draws power over the rated production of the socket, pop, breaker goes off.

The *only* thing they are trying to prevent is being on the hook for a passenger's health issue because they promised to make power available to run a CPAP.

If they didn't put these restrictions in, people would be, "I want a refund, I plugged my 80 watt CPAP into your 75 watt socket and the breaker went off so I couldn't run it and you said you were CPAP safe." or "I want a refund and here is a $1 million lawsuit because my CPAP went off in the middle of the night and didn't turn on and I suffered health consequences and you said I could use CPAP on this airplane."

The reason that they make you tell them about your CPAP if you are going to bring it on board is so they can specifically monitor you and insist that the plane is a CPAP free zone. They will not even let you charge the damn battery because there is a chance that the socket is dead.

If they said you can't use the socket to run the CPAP but you are allowed to charge the battery, then people would come on flyertalk asking "my socket was dead and I couldn't run my CPAP which I require, and the airline promised I could, what am I entitled to?"

Lastly if they claimed that the plane was CPAP friendly then maybe someone takes them to court and says that they have to put people with sleep apnea into a seat with a power socket for health reasons. If they don't have power sockets anywhere then maybe some overly liberal court gives them an order to upgrade these passengers to business class. Same kind of stuff about "you must allow a passenger to bring their comfort animal" and the ongoing stuff about whether or not a plane is a nut free zone.

This is not about safety.

My old Macbook drew 85 watts. I can get a CPAP that draws 60 watts. It is not about constant current. I plug in my laptop and I work in Photoshop for 8 hours if I want, running my intense high end graphics chip, spinning the hard drive at full speed, working with gigabyte sized files. I can further plug in my iPad and iPhone into the laptop to charge them and increase drain as much as I can.

The socket delivers constant power through the flight.

What they only want is to not *promise* that *every* passenger has an *entitlement* to constant power throughout the flight which is a requirement to run medical devices. So they do the full court press to stop you from using it, because as soon as one FA says yes it's OK to use it, then they start becoming responsible for providing this environment and on the hook when they don't.



So stop being Mr. Medical Device Airplane Crash Prevention Safety Official ok? Because if triggering the circuit breaker on a socket will bring down a 777 you can do this with a paperclip. A short circuit draws far more power than a CPAP device, basically whatever the socket can provide the short is going to use because there is no resistance to the current. And if you could bring planes down like this, they'd be dropping from the skies like rain. And no plane would be designed with power sockets whatsoever.

The plane has enough juice to run heat and AC and cook food and boil water without a blink. It has enough for everyone in business class to plug in laptops that draw more power than CPAP. I mean, the plane is drawing so much power from its fuel that it can keep a massive object of metal and filled with people's crap suspended in the air. The one or two people that might need CPAP though.... CRISIS.

It is not a risk or a threat. So, let it go.



Yes that darn non-compliant passenger trying to avoid long term brain damage and an overnight heart attack.

LETS SHOW HIM AND SHUT OFF HIS POWER

That will teach him.

God. What stupidity.