The most recent episode of the wonderful “Fly with Me” podcast dealt with people behaving badly on flights. The host of the show Joe Dion, a commercial airline pilot, remarked that when you think about how unnatural a commercial flight is with so many people crammed so close together in a pressurized metal tube 6 miles up it is amazing how usually things go so smoothly, but sometimes they don’t as Joe’s latest podcast describes. I thought of that podcast when I saw this story in the USA Today:

Man gets jail time, ordered to pay JetBlue $2,867 for disrupted flight

A JetBlue passenger was sentenced to 10 months in prison for threatening the airline’s flight attendants after they stopped serving him alcohol, The Buffalo News reports. The 27-year-old man apparently became “belligerent” with the attendants after they cut him off. He then “made several statements about shooting and killing the crew” once the plane landed, according to The Associated Press. The threats and poor behavior led JetBlue to divert its Houston-to-New York JFK flight to Buffalo, where the man was removed from the plane by the FBI. JetBlue’s crewmembers told authorities they stopped serving the man because he was obviously intoxicated.

Just in case we are unclear about the proper standards of behavior when flying commercially, let’s just say that threatening the crew is not something I am going to recommend.

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According to safetravel.dot.gov:

Effective January 1, 2008, the following rules apply to the spare lithium batteries you carry with you in case the battery in a device runs low:

• Spare batteries are the batteries you carry separately from the devices they power. When batteries are installed in a device, they are not considered spare batteries.
• You may not pack a spare lithium battery in your checked baggage
• You may bring spare lithium batteries with you in carry-on baggage – see our spare battery tips and how-to sections to find out how to pack spare batteries safely!
• Even though we recommend carrying your devices with you in carry-on baggage as well, if you must bring one in checked baggage, you may check it with the batteries installed.

The following quantity limits apply to both your spare and installed batteries. The limits are expressed in grams of “equivalent lithium content.” 8 grams of equivalent lithium content is approximately 100 watt-hours. 25 grams is approximately 300 watt-hours:

• Under the new rules, you can bring batteries with up to 8-gram equivalent lithium content. All lithium ion batteries in cell phones are below 8 gram equivalent lithium content. Nearly all laptop computers also are below this quantity threshold.
• You can also bring up to two spare batteries with an aggregate equivalent lithium content of up to 25 grams, in addition to any batteries that fall below the 8-gram threshold. Examples of two types of lithium ion batteries with equivalent lithium content over 8 grams but below 25 are shown below.
• For a lithium metal battery, whether installed in a device or carried as a spare, the limit on lithium content is 2 grams of lithium metal per battery.
• Almost all consumer-type lithium metal batteries are below 2 grams of lithium metal. But if you are unsure, contact the manufacturer!

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