Laptops that go BOOM in the plane

Speaking of things that go BOOM I was slightly disappointed that the Dell laptop battery recall didn't affect my Inspiron 700m. It is about 18 months old now and still going strong however the battery is starting to show signs of aging and a nice new and free one would have been great - never mind that it might have blown up any time in the last 18 months. Unfortunately mine is manufactured in Korea and the recall only affects older Sony Japan manufactured ones. Oh well.

However it does make me wonder what would have happened if I'd been sitting there in economy bashing away on my laptop when all of a sudden it bursts into flames. Can you even imagine how much shit that would have caused? Or what if it was in the hold and burned up all the luggage and maybe even took the plane down? At least inside the plane there would be a chance to get a fire extinguisher on it pronto. I doubt you'd ever see the end of homeland security probings ("bend over please") and FBI investigation of your entire life - heck you might even end up in Guantanamo before they would believe that well, the battery just blew up all of its own accord.

If a plane went down mid-flight becuase of an exploding battery it would cost billions... I think this, more than anything else might have been the ultimately driving force behind Dell's recall.