Your Battery Wants To Kill You

Astonishing Legends Network. It's Flashback Friday, and you know what that means. A classic episode of Scared All the Time's fan-favorite bonus show, New Fear Unlocked, is out of the vault and on the main feed. This episode originally aired on Patreon October 23rd, 2025, but is being played by you right now. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. You can't take a week off Not when the people need content So it's time to fill the trough With something halfway decent That only sort of rhymed Which is about halfway to decent So we're doing fine Hey everybody, welcome back to New Fear Unlocked. And today, I'm Chris Killary. And I'm Ed Vicola. And. We are going to talk a little bit about one of Ed and I's least favorite things to talk about, which is all the ways you could die on an airplane. Yeah. This is a recurring fear that he and I both have. I just started in the last year or two. His has gotten worse. Mine's been... Actually, mine's actually been getting better. We'll talk about that in a second. But this is Ed's fault that we're talking about this because he sends me articles to talk about on New Fear Unlocked, which I appreciate. It's very helpful. But he sent me the article that we're going to be talking about today, which concerns a very frightening way that you could die in an airplane that's almost nobody's fault but yours. But before we get to that. Oh, good. But I also actually should say I send articles, but I never read them. I see a headline that might be good for. Ed never reads them. And they are inconsistently. Sometimes they show up in my email. Sometimes they show up in my Instagram messages. Sometimes they get WhatsApp to me. And so I never know where an article is going to come from and whether or not it's going to be any good because Ed just sends it based on the headline. And what app is open. And which app he's founded in. So it's helpful, but only a little bit. But I wanted to kick off by kind of giving an airplane fear update because you and I both have been and are going to be traveling on planes at the time of this recording at the time of this recording at the time of this recording i have recently returned from greece where i had a nightmarish travel experience and you are about to leave. For just new york for a couple days. And you're going to get on a plane and be thinking about everything that we're talking about today yeah great. No it's not not i'll be thinking about just how we live in a society where Where there's no fucking air traffic controllers and planes keep falling out of the sky unrelated to that. Well, that is one of the things that I wanted to talk about. So my nightmarish airplane experience going to Greece was both– there was nothing nearly deadly about it except for one element. But it was– man, talk about someone who is afraid of flying just like their worst nightmare. I was supposed to get on a plane from Los Angeles to Chicago– First mistake. Chicago to London, London to Crete. That was the plan. Okay. We get from LA. To- Crete has its own airport? It's like a big island? It's a big island? Crete has its own airport, yeah. In my mind, I've always thought of Crete through mythology and stuff as being like a Catalina Island or something, but it has a giant airport. It's not very big, but you could drive around the whole island in probably like six hours. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, it's got one major airport. I think it might even have a second small airport. It has a big port for, like, cruise ships and stuff. Obviously, yeah. But anyway, so, you know, I'm already nervous. We're traveling with six-month-at-the-time old Felix and... you know, that makes me concerned about taking my Xanax because I know if, if my wife needs me or Felix needs me, if there's something going on, like, I don't want to be unconscious. Yeah. Not even like a dangerous thing, but just like a, he won't settle down or whatever. I'm going to feel like a real asshole if I'm just like, yeah, you know, unconscious. Look at this. Yeah. This, this person ruined the flight and he's the only one not experiencing. Yeah, exactly. So, so, but I, I take the Xanax anyway because I needed to get on the plane and And the flight from LA to Chicago, uneventful, no problem. Felix is great. On the runway, on the flight Chicago to London. Someone was trying to steal the wheels, according to the metrics certain people are using? No. We are delayed for two hours because air traffic control has pointed our plane, which is about to take off, directly at another plane that is about to take off. So we're at two opposite ends of the runway facing each other, both wanting to. I don't think that's how you even... How does it even happen? I don't know exactly how it happened, but I do know that the pilot got on the intercom and said, we are pointed at another plane that is trying to take off. So I don't know how it happened. And I don't blame air traffic control. I don't know who else you can blame on this. The guy with the little glowy sticks? Who else could you blame on this one? I blame them in the sense that it's their fault. Yeah, yeah, there you go. But I don't blame them in the sense that, as we've discussed on all of our other Flight Fear episodes, air traffic control in this country is underpaid, overworked. Understaffed. Understaffed, yeah. And they're losing people due to dumb shit also. I think O'Hare is the busiest airport in America, though. I think that's correct. And so we were delayed. And then this is where it gets worse though. Now, not only are we delayed and my Xanax basically kicks in and releases me from its comforting grip before we even take off because we're on the runway for so long. When we get to London, we discover that our flights have been rebooked because we missed our connecting flight. So we now have an additional plane that I have to get on. I have to go from London to Athens and then Athens to Crete because there's only occasional flights. From London to Crete. Yeah, I imagine most people were going to Athens. So on top of that, they lost one of our pieces of luggage and they charged us to recheck the luggage that they didn't lose. Huh. Because the luggage had to come off the plane, go onto a different airline's plane. This was in London? Sorry, this was in Athens when we got to Athens. I mean, look, didn't they have a financial collapse a few years ago? Yes. They have to make money any way they can over there. Any way they can. So anyway, it was a total nightmare. But this is where I think some people probably saw this photo because I think I posted it on maybe my Instagram. But this is a place we can put up a very funny picture. It took about 30 hours, this whole journey. And around hour 25 or 26, my wife took a picture of myself and Felix that we'll put up on the screen right here. And it pretty much encapsulates the entire trip. I felt miserable. And he smiled most of the way. Good. He was really, really good. I mean, the next time someone says they're getting married in another country when you have a six-month-old, say, no, thank you. Well, they... The couple who got married thanked us. They were like, you know, we really appreciate you guys coming. We have some other friends with kids who said we can't make it. Those are smarter friends. They saved a bunch of money and didn't have to experience whatever this is. It was a great trip. It was really, really worth it. Crete was awesome. The food was great. The drinks were great. You looked very happy. I was furious. I was having... Because I. Was like, man, every minute you're gone, we're going to compress time on other shit. But then you're like, this is the best day of my life. I'm snorkeling. Well, snorkeling in Crete wasn't as good. I've only snorkeled twice. Once in Hawaii, the first time I ever went snorkeling. I'm never doing that. And once in Crete. And man, I got spoiled snorkeling in Hawaii. Snorkeling in Crete is not as exciting. There's like three different species of fish and there's 10 of them. Yeah. And they all own diners. Yeah. even the fish i did. See a um uh a giant i think it was a loggerhead sea turtle in not while i was snorkeling but when i was walking along the the old venetian docks area there were all these boats lined up and there was this little crowd of people gathered and i walked over and there was this beautiful like brown and white uh sea turtle coming up out of the water and like going up and down and really really pretty uh but yeah crete's awesome um And. I'd like to go and experience it one day without a child. Yeah. Even with a child. Pretty great. No, I meant like the, everything leading up to, I'm sure once you're there and he's there, it's fine. And it's fine. Yeah. But I'm saying the traveling with the kids sounds like a nightmare. Yeah. But so traveling, that was my like air. And then this is, this is actually something, this is where I said, mine's actually getting better. I realized what just happened there. I realized on the way back, which was not as difficult, still very long journey, but not as. You found out that let you put Felix underneath. With the bags? Well, hilariously, so he's too young. We don't need to buy him his own seat, which is great because we save a little money. Yeah, I feel like some of the people who turned down because they got kids, were like at the ages you do have to buy him a seat and it was like i hope your marriage lasts but ours isn't going to if we have to spend another two grand on fucking bringing kids. But what's funny is when you fly in the states you know he just sits on your lap and the first time i did that with him i was like you know, for as serious as they get about making sure your luggage is stowed and everything's away in case you had turbulence, like you're just hanging onto this kid. If you, he's going to be bouncing around this whole cabin. I mean, I think until you're, Until college, basically. Every school bus in America has no seatbelts. Yeah, but then. So kids are always not strapped up. When you fly in Europe, they give you an additional seatbelt. So you buckle and you slide a second seatbelt over yours to buckle your kid to you. That is the most... Of course they do. Yeah, obviously this is a thing you should do. No, yeah, there's a lot of that. It's a lot of like, oh, your Froot Loops... aren't fucking bright orange because you have all these rules that we have to adhere to when sending food to you yeah and it's the same thing with that oh you guys have like a right to repair law so like people can't just make iphones that you know use proprietary bullshit like all that shit that we did they just not have lobbyists like how does that work like how come they get all the stuff it seems like common. Sense Yeah, I don't know exactly how come things in some ways seem a lot better throughout Europe, but. But then you're there and you're like, this is a shithole. Every time I've been to Europe, too, I have that thing. I'm like, your plugs are big and stupid. The plugs are big and stupid. There's a lot of dumb crap, too, but there's a lot of common sense. A lot of stuff that works. Anyway, what I was going to say is part of the reason I think my fear of flying is getting better on the way back, I didn't take Xanax because I realized with Felix... I have so much to think about keeping him from freaking out and I have to feed him and bounce him and play with him. I don't even have time to think about all the ways the plane could crash. You know, I'm just like, okay, please don't start screaming. Please don't start screaming. And, you know, I'm talking to him and it's a constant. Do I have to change the diaper? Does he want to go to sleep? And so I kind of, and he's fascinated by the plane. So I'm trying to look at it as he's learning how to fly and I'm going to learn how to fly with him. is kind of the way I'm going to look at it. Got you. You know, like I'm going to be a good person on planes because I want to raise him to be good on planes. So I'm going to figure this out. I guess. Yeah. And then as soon as he's old enough to do shit on his own, you're going to go right back to like spiraling about things that aren't distracting you. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be like, what was that? Now it's like, wake up daddy when we get there. Wake up daddy later. Yeah. Yeah. But what are you currently worried about on your flight this coming week? I just feel like everything now, like every bump now, I'm like, that's it. That's just, you know. Yeah, the FAA is going to just. It's just, I don't know what it is. Yeah, like I used to, I never had a problem with planes at all. But now I'm like gripping the armrest when I'm landing and like taking off and. I'm just like, because I'm like, what the fuck? And I told you, I think I might have said that in a previous episode, the last flight I took was the newest plane I've ever been on. Yeah. It was like, everything was wildly new. Like, they had all these plugs, that thing, Bob. And I was like, oh, we're dead. Like, I want a 20-year-old plane when it wasn't as much about profit share. Right. I want something where I know all the bolts are in it. They're not cutting costs. Right. Like, the fact that I see a USB-C plug in here tells me, this was made with some mandates. You're like, wow, the, I'm looking around and the whole shell here seems seamless. I don't see any rivets. I don't see any. And they're like, yeah, that's correct. It's all glue. It's all glue. You ever hear of airplane glue? Well, we figured out how to use it on real planes. Oh, I see. You've, you've, you've whited out the model part of model airplane glue. Uh, like thought we wouldn't notice. So yeah, I just get like nervous about like, There seems to be not nearly as big an uptick in plane crashes post-doing our episode as we've seen in theme park accidents that seem to have been on a crazy uptick since we did our episode. So I'm definitely not getting on a fucking ride, but I will get on the plane. I would rather drive. But yes, that's the only fear I have is that things out of my control and out of the pilot's control are going to fuck us. Well. Here's something that could really fuck you. Okay. According to CNN Travel... That's a site? This is a site, CNN Travel. Oh, my God. You sent me this article, so you know this site exists. Yeah, but you know I'm never on CNN, though, so it must have been posted somewhere else. The headline is. Yeah. What happens when a device nearly every passenger carries on board a plane erupts in smoke and flames? Oh, I can see how that caught my attention. Yeah. Yeah. I want to know what this thing we all hold is. Almost every passenger carries lithium ion batteries onto airplanes. Oh, they're in our cell phones. In their phones, in their laptops, rechargeable power packs, and even vapes, which as far as I know, aren't supposed to go on planes for this very reason, I think. Yeah, but maybe it's like they're just in the bag. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still a battery on board. When something goes wrong with one of them, Federal Aviation Administration tests show the results can be Catastrophic. Okay. Delta Airlines Flight 1334 was flying from Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale last month when smoke and flames started pouring out of a backpack. The pilots declared an emergency and diverted to Fort Myers where the 191 people on board safely evacuated. The culprit was a passenger's personal lithium-ion battery pack which had been tucked away in the carry-on bag. Personal. They don't tell you what kind of device? They don't tell you what kind of device. I just want to pause here to say this is like one of my worst nightmares. Is you being the one? No. Well, I mean, that would be embarrassing on top of everything. But also you'd probably end up there'd be a moment where you're being arrested for terrorism because no one knows that that wasn't a planned explosion. The first thing that would happen, though, would be that I would think I'm about to be a victim of terrorism. Because if you see smoke and flames pouring out of a backpack, I'm not like, Oh, boy, it looks like someone's lithium ion battery is really having a rough day. That's not what you're thinking. I'm thinking. You're thinking shoe bomber. Yeah, I'm thinking. We're not gonna be able to bring bags now. Somebody has an international bone to pick on this airplane, and we're about to go down. Shit, man. Genuinely, that would be... I mean, any kind of... Anything... I hope I'm never on one of those planes where they're like, oh, they had to restrain a passenger or whatever, because no matter how normal it turns out. To be just like a medical issue yeah. Those couple of minutes i'm gonna be losing my fucking mind to a level that is going to probably also get me in trouble because. Yeah i i mean there's already times where i want to like like can we make the the the times i want to beat the shit out of other passengers yeah already, and they're not even, like, doing anything annoying. Yeah. Well, they're annoying me, but I'm saying, like, if I had a person who was, like, making a scene, they had to restrain them for, like, being hammered or, like, not, like, seizuring. For anything other than a seizing situation, I'm like, we're over international waters, right? I can do what I want. I don't know how the laws work up here. Let's throw this fucking person out. We're not turning it around. This was not even worth talking about at the beginning of the episode because it really wasn't that much, but since you say it, On the flight back from London to Los Angeles, it was like an 11-hour flight. The older British man next to me on the other side of the aisle had three beers and maybe like five, not rum and Cokes, like ginger whiskeys. Okay. I don't know. I'm shocked, A, that they served him as much as they did. But at one point, he stopped to go to the bathroom and immediately fell over. And everybody was like, are you okay? And he's like, wow, his face was like bright red. He was like, oh, I'm fine. Yeah, but like, that must be an international flight thing. Because I feel like there's a bunch of rules now domestically since we had that like scourge of like post-COVID. That break in society that happened after COVID where everyone's just monstrous to each other. And like we had to like, I think there's like tons of rules on like JetBlue, let's say. That's like, hey, we can't sell you more than two or you can't bring your own little nips anymore and stuff. Yeah, I knew you couldn't bring your own little nips. I mean, they gave me three beers, no questions asked. And I was ordering more because I was watching this guy just, I mean, they didn't even look like they were charging him. Charge him with a crime. Yeah. Anyway, so this backpack went up in flames. Not a sentence you want to hear on an airplane or a thing you want to see on an airplane. At the FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center for Advanced Aerospace in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Oh, my God. What? The epicenter of technology. Yeah. Well, slot machine technology. Fire safety engineers research and demonstrate just how bad this can be. Quote, lithium batteries can go into what's called thermal runaway, fire safety branch manager Robert Oakes explained. All of a sudden, it'll start to short circuit. It'll get warmer and warmer and warmer until the structure of the battery itself fails. At that point, it can eject molten electrolyte and flames and smoke and toxic gas. I will say this, man. It's a lot of ands. This fucking GoPro we use when we're done filming, it is piping hot. I've had you touch it, I think. It is piping hot. And if you leave your phone in the sun, even for like a little bit of time, right? Like iPhones, I don't know about Android, it's probably similar. It'll like turn off on its own and you'll get a little alert being like, come back when this cools down. Didn't they have a problem with the samsung galaxy's exploding. They were fully exploding at some point. Yeah uh i feel like that became a meme like this like samsung galaxy's. Exploding all my old iphones i was just i keep all my old phones back when i before i leased everything and because technology is a fucking graveyard. Like, there's no reason, in my opinion, to own too many things. It's all going to become obsolete or, like, built to fail. But all my old iPhones, they're, like, super bowed in the back. Like, the batteries expand over time. I've seen that. That's why, by the way, we're supposed to dispose of batteries correctly. Yeah, but no one does. There's, like, places you're supposed to go to recycling centers. And, like, lithium in particular. Like, if I mailed something with lithium in it, I have to have, like, whole separate stuff on the... On the package, people know. What's the... When you check your luggage, they ask you if you have... There's a certain type of battery that they ask you if you have. It's probably lithium. So they... Okay. So let me get this straight. You can just say no. I think it is lithium. But. So I'd never thought about this before until I read this article. But so you are not allowed to put lithium ion batteries in your checked luggage because they could catch fire and explode and send the plane down. But you are allowed to bring them... Onto the plane itself. I have to imagine the reason is, and I don't know, is the cabin is pressurized and maybe below isn't. Which is why people freeze to death. You try and sneak onto things. That's why you can't put a pet below in a cage. And I guess if. If your lithium-ion battery were to catch fire. Down there, no one could just grab it. No one would know until it was too late, whereas. Yeah. Well, you'd hope there'd be a fire alarm or something, but I guess, yeah, if it's in the back of a seat or something, you can put it out pretty quickly. But also, if you say yes, they're like, okay. Right? Do they stop you, or do you have to always put it in your check? No. Always put it in your carry-on. If they ask, and you say yes, and they just go, great, that would be very weird. I would be like, wait, hang on a second. I don't know. Do I need to do something? Because I've definitely... traveled with all sorts of technology or like when we travel we bring a lot of stuff for the for the pod and shit but nothing battery operated goes yeah but i also don't think i told anyone whatever they're good they're x-raying it. Hey are you enjoying this old episode of new fear unlocked if so don't forget that you can stay up to date with brand new commercial free episodes of it every week the main show's off now here's one of those ad breaks you could be avoiding. The FAA conducted a demonstration for CNN inside their research hangar. CNN travel. CNN travel inside their black ops, super secret Atlantic city research hangar to show what could happen. A rechargeable consumer battery pack, which might be used to charge a laptop or a cell phone was tucked into a seat back pocket and heated. Okay. Heated to more than 300 degrees to simulate the thermal runaway. I was about to say it, Seems like the thresholds are pretty high to get there. And realistically, if you're on a modern airplane, you're just plugging that device into the seat and not into the like travel. Yeah. It says suddenly sparks and flames. Well, there's a typo that sparks and fames violently erupted, scorching nearby seats and sending smoke billowing. We can put a photo up here on screen so you can see what this looks like. And it looks like a really big, scary fire, especially if you were on an airplane and Um, I, again, yeah, I have questions about why, like if three, if thermal runaway happens at 300 degrees, then like, yes, obviously this thing's going to burst into flame. No, but I think the 300 degrees like the, uh, GoPro. Oh, it self generates. It's generating that heat because it's processing or doing whatever. And as we put more and more and more and more and more transistors and shit on smaller and smaller and smaller things, I imagine it's, all that energy on a smaller device would heat up faster. Right, right, right. Quote, the testing that we're doing here is helping flight attendants, Oaks said. Shout out our flight attendant fans. Yeah, Juno, what's up? Anytime that there's a fire on an airplane. Oh, also the rest of our flight attendant fans. Yeah, anytime that there's a fire on an airplane, it's a serious concern. And action has to be taken immediately because there is no escape. That's true. You're in a tube in the sky. He really underlines the severity there. I mean, that could have also been the pitch for snakes on a plane. Yeah. There's no escape. There's no escape. These thermal runaways are difficult to fight. The FAA recommends flight attendants first use a halon fire extinguisher, which is standard equipment on airplanes, but that alone may not be enough. In the test performed for CNN, the flames sprung back up in just moments. quote grab that hand extinguisher use it to put the flames out but we know from our testing that's not gonna stop and that fire will reignite with a lithium battery well. Isn't that like a real thing for real for real like if your tesla gets in a wreck or whatever or catches on fire that fired firefighters are like we ain't touching that like we don't even fuck with that like that's a whole different like Battery fire is a whole different animal. And some of those this well, the end of this quote is adding the water as much water from the galley cart, non-alcoholic liquids, everything that they can get to just start pouring on that device. But I was going to say, I think aren't there some battery fires that you're not supposed to put water on or is that just oil fires? It might just be oil fires or grease fires or something. Grease fires. But I guess maybe in a car wreck, maybe you don't know if there's grease. Yeah, but I do know for a fact that there are firefighters that were like, we're not, like, let it burn out. Right. Not because maybe that it will make it worse. It might just be like, this will be efforts in futility. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The problems are not new, but more batteries are being carried onto planes than ever before, like you just said. Safety Organization UL Standards and Engagement says today an average passenger flies with four devices powered by lithium ion batteries. I have one on my wrist right now. I have one in my pocket right now. And there's two recording us. My laptop I'll be working on. I'm saying on the flight, I usually have, I mean, whatever. It's a little disgusting the level of like Apple ecosystem I'm in, but I'm saying like there's three that will be in my seat for sure. Well, here's the real stomach churning quote of the article. The incidents of fire are rare, but they are increasing. We're seeing as many as two per week, either on planes or within airports. I'm sorry. Whoa. Okay. Well, Jesus Christ, though. Two per week. Jeff Marushin, the president and CEO of the UL Standards and Engagement Organization, told CNN. Wow. Two per week is too, too many per week. It is. How often... I'd love to know the stats on how often this runaway... thermal detonation or whatever happens like how often is this just happening everywhere. Yeah like yeah i mean i feel like at these numbers we should be able to look out the window right now and see one person on fire. The car just going somebody should be blowing up the faa allows most consumer personal electronic devices with lithium ion batteries in checked and carry-on luggage. Okay however that's a little different what you said yeah well. Because they ask you about Maybe it's a different kind of battery, but I could swear they asked you about. Was it for international customs you just dealt with? No, no, no. Because they asked about vapes. They're like, are there any vapes? Are there any whatever in the travel? The guy moving your luggage wants to know. So you can steal your vapes, dude. That's all. However, the latest federal data shows external battery packs are the top cause of incidents. And as a result, the FAA has banned them from checked baggage where they are harder to extinguish. So external battery packs are... Okay, I thought there'd be one right there, but those are the ones where you plug in when your shit's running out. So maybe they do just ban like those and vapes. Maybe there are specific kinds of lithium ion batteries that you weren't allowed to have. And I bet you maybe there's, you know how like you go on Amazon and you try and buy something and there's like, like let's say those neck cooler things we got. Yeah. If you go on Amazon right now, there's a billion made by a billion different brands, but they're all made in the same fucking factory. Right. And so I wonder, and the reason I bring that up is There's no, the more you find of knockoff products. Yeah. Like no one's making a knockoff Apple computer. Right. And so. Well, someone is, I'm sure. Yeah. And then we'll lose that IP battle in China. Yeah. What I'm getting at is that like there's a level of care and safety checks in guards that go into making R & D and finishing a product like this. I feel like. when you go to look up an external battery pack on Amazon, there's 2 million options and they're $ 4. Right. And so it's not like made by Apple. It's made by like bing bong. Well, I wish I had chosen a better, less racist Saudi one, but I'm saying it's, it's made by just a random thing that they've sheathed, put a new sheath on. Yeah. And so I can imagine that they're, they're, they're going to be not put to the most strength, strenuous stress testing. Yeah. Despite all the warnings, you all safety. Yeah. Despite all the warnings, UL standards and engagement says two in five passengers still check external battery packs. Yeah, I'm sure I did it not even realizing it was not okay. We know that within the cargo compartment, lithium battery fires are a serious danger. Passengers should bring them with them on board and they should be readily accessible. If one does happen to catch on fire and it's stuffed deep within your bag all the way up in an overhead bin... That's going to be a very hard fire for a flight attendant to fight. True. And it's also going to catch all the other bags on fire. Now we have like, what the heck's that line in Independence Day where it's like, we should nuke it. Or it's like, yeah, I can make one. giant item into a lot of smaller nuclear items. Yeah, whatever it was. Like just, it's a good idea though where it's like, yeah, I don't shoot it because then it's going to create more destruction. So if it blows up up there, it's like, Now we've got 13 bags on fire versus one item. Also, you're right. Two and five passengers still say they check them, but five and five passengers check them. Yeah. They just don't. When they were asked this question, they didn't know what it meant. Exactly. And like I said earlier, it's a device that is for when you have no outlets. Right. So you just throw it in your checked bag because I'm never going to use this on the plane. I'm going to plug it in the plane. Right. In January, Air Busan Airbus A321 on the ground at Gimhae International Airport in South Korea was gutted by flames. There's a very scary looking picture here. Scare bus. If that scare bus had been in the air and the roof looking like that, that would have been nightmare city. South Korea? Yeah. The investigation. Just took them from the Samsung factory. They're made in Korea, right? Samsung? Yeah. Yeah. The investigation is ongoing, but the cause is thought to be a personal power pack battery stored in an overhead bin. 27 people were injured, three seriously. All because he paid bing bong prices and didn't get that beautiful Samsung that I was just joking about. And as a result, South Korea created rules preventing power banks from being kept in overhead bids and prohibiting charging devices on board. In the United States, Southwest Airlines now requires all battery packs to remain in plain sight when being used, and passengers cannot charge devices in the overhead bins. We know that this is a solvable problem, and first and foremost, it is about passenger awareness and education, Marushin said. A lithium battery fire on the ground is dangerous enough. At 30,000 feet, it can be a catastrophe. I mean, a lot of problems in this country are about Yeah. And we're solving none of them. Yeah, 100%. So good luck getting 90% of the people who ever get on a plane to understand what a lithium battery is. Also, interestingly enough, this seems to me a genuine real problem of like. yeah, this could happen versus the like, everyone needs to turn their cell phones off when we take off. Yeah. Because A, as a society, we have no idea why. And then B, I have a friend who does sports medicine and he travels with a prominent sports team and the sports team does not fly coach. Right. They fly private. And he's like, yeah, I couldn't help but notice when I started flying, like no one ever told us to turn shit off. Like, We're using our phones. We're standing. We're doing whatever we want, and we fly. At no point does the pilot in the private flight be like, everyone, please turn their phones off for takeoff. Yeah. And so it's like, we don't even know what that one is. At least this one you can show a picture of a kid with his hair on fire and be like, hey, guys, we don't want this to happen on this flight. Yeah. So. At some point, I think, read or heard that shutting the cell phones off has to do with just making sure that your cell phone signals aren't interfering with any of the transponder signals and stuff or the radio communication between the tower. And the plane. There's nobody in the tower now, so don't. Worry about it. I don't know. And again, it seems like, yeah, plenty of planes take off with lots of phones not turned off, lots of phones not in airplane mode. So I don't entirely know. Remember when not turning his phone off was one of the bigger issues Alec Baldwin had in his life? Yeah. Passengers... this article says should let flight attendants know if a device is getting too hot. And if a battery powered device is dropped into a seat, they should get help before trying to adjust the seat. Okay. This person's real concerned about it. I guess we should be, but this is wild. I'm going to hit the button up there and make, excuse me, my device is hot. She just like throws it out the door, like pull up the emergency door. It's gotta be a thing where it's like, well, what do you want me to do about it? If you lose a device and a seat, I don't know if this quote is quite right. I think it means to be in between the cushions. This might be if you lose a device in a seat. It says and a seat. If you lose your seat, you have a new set of problems. If you lose a device in a seat, don't operate the seat because it could pinch it and that could cause a thermal runaway too. Here's the thing. I don't operate my seat at all. There's two schools of thought on this and I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion. I don't believe... There's ever a reason to recline your chair on a fucking plane. Don't do it. And as a person who works on every flight and I always have my laptop in front of me and I got a bit of a gut, I now have to work. You have gained, I imagine zero meaningful comfort from what that three inches you just did. And it ruined my ability to work the whole rest of the flight. Yeah. So I am answer. I know one should be moving their chairs anyway, but the. The bigger concern here is if you pinch it, it could cause a thermal... That's how they defeated the monsters in that Goosebumps book. One day at Monsterland, if you pinched them, they exploded. We've designed our battery cases on the R.L. Stine method of if you pinch these things, they catch fire and explode. It sounds like we should be designing them based on the putties in... Power Rangers, where if you pinch them, they disappear. Yeah. That would be a lot more helpful. The best bet is anything that's going wrong with your device, call the flight attendant. So Juno. That's on you. You're up. I hope you have, that's not the camera we use, but I hope we have training. On what to do. Oh, this is what you were just saying. Consumers can also avoid devices that are cheaply made. Quote, if it's a lot cheaper than the other devices on the market, then most likely it doesn't have the most rigorous manufacturing. Look at that. There could be latent defects within the device itself that could cause it to fail. Dude, you just spend $ 8 more and don't get a bing bong. I don't even know, but these days, if you buy something off Amazon, it's all cheap. There isn't, outside of, I guess, you want to get the one name brand that you recognize, I guess. Yeah, you want to get an anchor or something that you've heard of. The thing is, all the cheap ones, I imagine they're all just made in the same factory. They're probably under the. Headphones are. That's how they do headphones. Yeah, under the sheath, it might just be Beats under there, but you're paying less, but I don't know. I watched this thing on YouTube that was fucking so interesting to me. Is it loose change? I'm just kidding. I watched this thing on YouTube. It was so interesting to me. It was one of those like, is this expensive Thunderbolt, Apple Thunderbolt cable worth the like $ 140 price tag for a cable? And you can get essentially a cable that, you know, at least by appearance is, It's the same thing for $ 4. Yeah. And so, but they did this like crazy amount of technology. Like they MRI'd it basically, like CAT scan this shit, like LIDAR'd to like go through. And it was like, yeah, it's profoundly better made. Like so many things are smartly thought out and this is how data transfers through it. And this is how it shields this and blah, blah, blah. And then they like look inside the cheaper one and it was like, one wire like barely on yeah that like comes with a fire extinguisher yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah there is a thing about yeah rigorous rigorous standards that you're not gonna get with the bing bong. And that you're not gonna get from this show either Guys, this is one day. But that's... We have a battery heating up right now. We have a battery heating up right now. And ladies and gentlemen, I believe we're going to need to bring this episode of New Fear Unlocked to an end because one of us is going to have to grab a fire extinguisher very shortly. Well, at least this was a very... I talked a lot about unrelated shit. So hopefully people like that in this episode. It's great. It's always great. I always love sitting down and talking to you and hearing what's on your mind. Until next time, I'm Chris Collari. And I'm Ed Vecola. We hope you're fire safe. We'll see you at the next New Fear Unlocked. I hope you're fireproof. Fireproof. We'll see you next time. All right, bye-bye. Bye-bye. The theme song may say this show has no name, but as you know, it actually has a name. New Fear Unlocked. The thing you guys always say, that's the name. There's nothing more after this Thanks for coming