The Virgin Atlantic airline has lifted its ban on
battery powered Dell and Apple laptops – but passengers must still
have battery serial numbers checked to ensure they are not from a
batch hit by a fire hazard warning.
The ban was imposed by Virgin earlier this month after Dell and
Apple recalled nearly six million batteries between them after a
small number of machines caught fire. The faulty batteries in both
Dell and Apple machines were made by Sony.
The move followed similar bans by Australian airline Qantas and
Korean Air.
In new advice to passengers, Virgin is now permitting laptop
battery use, where cabin crew members have checked that the battery
serial number does not match any of the recalled batches.
But batteries must be removed from laptops if they have been
identified by Apple or Dell as being a fire risk. Passengers with
airline seats fitted with power supplies would be offered leads and
adaptors, but laptop use would remain entirely prohibited for
passengers with fire hazard batteries where in-seat power supplies
were not available, Virgin said.
But concern over laptop batteries is continuing, with Lenovo
investigating a laptop fire at Los Angeles airport last week that
caused panic amid fears of a bomb attack. Lenovo said the machine
was a ThinkPad T43 but did not confirm whether it was powered by a
Sony battery.
Last week, Toshiba joined the Sony battery recall, with a batch
of 340,000 batteries affected, while earlier this month Panasonic
called in 6,000 batteries in laptops sold in Japan, which it said
were not made by Sony.
Vote for your IT greats
Who have been the most influential people in IT in the past 40
years? The greatest organisations? The best hardware and software
technologies? As part of Computer Weekly’s 40th anniversary
celebrations, we are asking our readers who and what has really
made a difference?
Vote now at:
www.computerweekly.com/ITgreats