A fire broke out in the cabin of a V Air passenger liner bound for Japan on Friday night after a portable battery in a passenger’s carry-on luggage spontaneously caught fire in the first incident of its kind affecting a Taiwanese air carrier, the Aviation Safety Council (ASC) said yesterday.
“This was the first incident of a mobile device power source triggering a fire on a domestic airliner in flight,” council executive director Thomas Wang (王興中) said.
He said that between 1991 and last year there have been more than 170 incidents involving lithium battery explosions on commercial aircraft worldwide, but this was the first case involving a Taiwanese air carrier.
Photo: Copy by Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
“The council plans to investigate the case,” he said.
The device in question was a lithium battery made in China, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said, adding that it was not immediately clear what type of electronic device it was used to power.
Wang said that the battery did not catch fire because it was on an aircraft in flight, and it would have caught fire even if it had not been brought onto the plane.
There have been discussions on whether mobile power sources should be allowed on airplanes, he said, but cell phones also have lithium batteries and “the possibility of banning them is not high.”
Current practice among the world’s airlines is that mobile power sources — as long as they are kept in carry-on luggage — can be brought aboard aircraft, he said.
Flight ZV252 took off from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport for Haneda Airport at 10:26pm on Friday.
The fire was put out shortly after it began, and the battery was placed in a bucket of water to ensure that it would not reignite.
All the aircraft’s 161 passengers and crew members were unharmed in the incident.
Due to safety concerns, the captain flew the aircraft back to Taoyuan airport.
The aircraft arrived at the airport at 11:21pm and was confirmed not to have been damaged. The budget air carrier, in consideration of the lingering smell of smoke, arranged for the passengers to take another flight, which left at 12:30am yesterday.
The airline said that the council had confirmed the safety of the aircraft before it was put back into service yesterday.
When the crew members return to Taiwan, they will be questioned so that officials can learn more about the fire, the council said.
SMALL RESPITE: The past few rainy days, which came after one month of virtually no rain on the west coast, did not ease Taiwan’s water shortage problems, the CWB said A weather system from southern China has over the past three days replenished Taiwan’s reservoirs with almost 16 million tonnes of water, giving Taiwan a slight relief from a water shortage, the Water Resources Agency (WRA) said yesterday. From 12am on Tuesday to 4pm yesterday, about 15.97 million tonnes fell in the catchment areas of the nation’s reservoirs, which is slightly more than Taiwan’s average daily water use, it said. However, the rain would ease today, with only isolated showers forecast in Hualien and Taitung counties, as well as in southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) said. For other regions, cloudy to
A debt dispute between a restaurant owner and a criminal ring might be behind a bizarre cockroach attack at the Taipei eatery on Monday night while it was hosting a police gathering, Taipei Police Commissioner Chen Jia-chang (陳嘉昌) said yesterday. Preliminary findings of a police investigation into the case at the G House Taipei suggest that the unusual incident might have been directed at the restaurant’s owner, who allegedly owes money to the Bamboo Union, Chen said. The suspects were Bamboo Union members and there was no evidence indicating that the cockroaches were targeted at the police officers at the restaurant, he
Taiwan’s armed forces should closely monitor China’s development of a new tanker aircraft, as it would significantly boost the Chinese air force’s capability to carry out long-range raids, a military expert said on Wednesday. Ou Si-fu (歐錫富), a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said in an online article that China is developing a tanker variant of its Y-20 military transport aircraft, known as the Y-20U. The Y-20 has a maximum take-off weight of 220 tonnes and the tanker variant is expected to carry up to 60 tonnes of fuel, more than three times the maximum
TRAVELING WHILE CONTAGIOUS: The highest risk of infection is indoors, especially in settings where people take off their masks to eat and drink, an expert warned The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday posted a list of places visited by people who were recently diagnosed with COVID-19 while they were likely contagious, urging people who visited the sites at the same time to practice self-health management. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, said that confirmed case No. 1,129 — a woman in her 60s who works at Novotel Taipei Taoyuan International Airport, a designated quarantine facility, and tested positive on Friday — visited Chiayi between Friday last week and Monday. On the first day of her trip, she visited the Big Chiayi
RSS