The fire that destroyed a United Par­cel Ser­vice DC-8 air­craft in Philadel­phia in Feb­ru­ary 2006 is now thought to have been caused by Lithium-Ion bat­ter­ies for lap­top computers.

In August 2004, Apple recalled 28,000 Power­book com­put­ers after dis­cov­er­ing a design flaw in their Korean-made bat­tery packs that caused two of them to catch fire. But that’s just one exam­ple: there is quite a his­tory of prod­uct recalls due to self-immolating battery-powered devices. And the cargo car­ri­ers have already seen sev­eral large ramp fires caused by ship­ments of batteries.

This announce­ment only strength­ens my belief that every lap­top com­puter and cel­lophone on an air­plane is a highly potent incen­di­ary device. Evi­dently the Trans­porta­tion Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion is okay with that.