> Surely it's worth the expense.

you'd think the same about parachutes for everyone which could have rescued lives on some of the plane disasters.

Parachutes would barely save any lives.

First, commercial air travel is incredibly safe.

Second, parachuting requires extensive training which a negligible number of passengers have. It's not like you just jump out of a plane and it works automatically. Not to mention dealing with cold, oxygen deprivation, landing in the middle of the ocean, etc.

Third, it's going to take at least a half hour for everyone to put parachutes on and jump out in an orderly fashion. How many aviation accidents have had a half hour of extra time where they already knew they would fatally crash?

You just invented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_Syst... even though i don't know how that would work on a commercial sized plane.

Ballistic recovery parachute systems aren't scalable. The necessary size and weight would be completely impractical for anything much larger or faster than a Cirrus.

Commercial air travel is very safe. The few crashes that do occur usually involve flight into terrain, mid-air collisions, or structural break up. Parachutes are ineffective for those failure modes. The parachute on a Cirrus mainly protects against total engine or flight control system failures, which aren't a real concern on airliners.

Were the 737 Max crashes flight control failures?

Parachutes wouldn't help with that anyway, the crashes were just after take off.

People want to use them during the flight. A storage container wouldn't get used.

You can dump the burning phone into them. The gasses are probably worse than the initial fire.

A burning battery spewing out gases is going to quickly pressurize any sort of bag, isn't it?

They work really well just look at the bags for racing drone batteries on YouTube.

I looked up a video. The guy was piercing lipo batteries with nails, inside and outside fire proof bags. The bag appeared to be spewing out just as much toxic gas as a battery not in a bag.

The last few times I've flown, I've noticed that with the other 'emergency' gear that the crew has stowed away in one of the overhead bins, they now have a fireproof bag in there too. So it's not quite at every seat, but they do seem to carry some on board.

That does very little for situations where checked-in baggage has a lithium ion battery that ignites. They tell you to remove things like laptops and portable batteries from your checked in luggage, but I haven't heard disposable vapes mentioned, and those very often have lithium ion batteries too.

While they’re not under every seat, battery fire containment bags are already included in airlines’ onboard emergency equipment, for flight attendants to use when needed.

https://avsax.com/news/what-to-do-if-a-lithium-battery-catch...

And hopefully some tongs to move the devices into the bag while still molten.

I'm perversely curious how bad the smoke issue is when this happens on planes. Honestly fucked up, but I actually don't think the fire is really that much of an issue, is almost no real threat. You bet your ass the plane, the seats, the carpet, the bulkheads are non-flammable. There's no real threat here, from what I can tell. Other than the harm of a major smoke release. I know there's a ton of air systems on planes... It's be so interesting to see a video of an extreme battery detonation test on a plane, to see how the smoke & air systems handle it.

Lithium fires don't smother, and the battery itself can explode.

The only option is to not allow them on planes.

It doesn't really help that much. Lithium battery fires don't need environmental oxygen.