[ash_091]

A train can go from "cruising speed" to letting passengers off to escape a fire in about a minute.

A plane might take anywhere from five minutes to several hours to be able to safely let passengers out.

Personally I feel that's a good enough reason to impose more robust restrictions on Things Which May Cause Fire on planes compared to trains. Especially in the case of lithium batteries where they're more or less impossible to extinguish one they're going.

[zamadatix]

I agree with the concept of comparing risk being the meaningful approach, but I disagree this is how you go about measuring risk. How many people are being injured/killed per million km or something is the type of metric. Air travel far exceeds those types of metrics vs other common modes of travel, yet is always the first one to be further focused on how bad it could potentially be.

[appreciatorBus]

I would argue at the performance of aviation safety, and the constant focus on how bad it could be, is exactly why aviation is safe. The day that we decide to stop focussing on what could go wrong, is the day that aviation stops being safe.

For example, if aircraft come within five nautical miles or I think it’s 1000 vertical feet, it’s considered a very serious incident. Not because anyone is in danger at five nautical miles or 1000 vertical feet, but because if you don’t draw the line there, and treat that barrier as seriously as if two aircraft had collided, then there isn’t really a barrier at all.

[Wistar]

I have, for a while now, wondered when an airborne battery incident will be calamitous enough for a complete ban on power banks.

[abenga]

There was one accident, but it was a pallet of batteries on a cargo plane that killed the crew.

[nxm]

Cigarette fires and battery fires are not same in terms of efforts to put them out. Look up electric vehicle fires and what it takes to contain them