January 1st Airline Battery Ban

New TSA regulations banning rechargeable lithium batteries as checked luggage goes in effect January 1st.

You can carry batteries inside your devices (phones, ;aptops, ca,eras, mp3 players). Spares have to be carried with you in your carry-on baggage, and you may not carry spares in your checked-in luggage unless they are inside the devices.

This is more paranoia from the government. They are afraid of fires. Whats next? Sedate us and carry us in strait jackets?

The rule comes with a chart.

Let's look at this from an engineering perspective.

My Nikon camera battery is rated at 1500mAh (current time, or IT) at 7.4V (voltage or V). The formula for power capacity in watt-hours is :

PC = IT x V

Therefore, the battery's power capacity is 11.1 Watt-hours.

Note for those folks who don't play with these units, mA is milliamperes or 1/1000 of an ampere, the unit for current flow. We'll come back to this issue later.

This is below the 100 Watt-hour threshold. To meet the threshold, I need nine of these batteries. All of my spare batteries are in the plastic "sleds" that they are sold with - note that the isolation of battery contacts is another very important part of the TSA directives.

The open question is how the aggregate is managed by TSA, and how we can provide TSA with definitive information to show that the batteries are below their thresholds. Unfortunately, most manufacturer's sites for the do not show the technical specification for the battery with a watt-hour rating.

We're all going to be needing to be able to explain the battery systems to TSA, or not to have spare batteries in our carry-on bags. As pleasant as some TSA folks can be (or not), it's highly likely that they will not have been trained on units like mA, A, or watt-hours anytime soon. Understanding the issue of Li gram equivalents is going to be like advanced doctoral studies for most of the screeners, so we should be prepared to have to either throw away spare (expensive) batteries at the security checkpoint or to not bring them any spares on these trips.

Wait till the insurance company finds how many rechargeable lithium batteries I have lying around the house. Then I'll be in trouble.

This sounds like one of those stupid decisions by committee.