Originally Posted by
missydarlin
There were no flames at any point.
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.