Note: buy batteries for camera, radio and plane

Ruu_Old

The Japanese are at it again. Ryanair will be recharging their batteries of course. Great stuff here. Stock up on those AA batteries everyone!

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese students succeeded on Sunday in making a manned flight in a plane powered only by household batteries.

The group from the Tokyo Institute of Technology flew the plane a distance of 1,283 feet at an airfield north of the capital, in what was the first such battery-powered flight, said a spokesman for Matsush1ta Electric Industrial Co, the project's sponsors.

The plane, with a 31-meter wing span but weighing just 44 kg, was piloted by a 63-kg student for the trip, which lasted about one minute.

The power was provided by 160 AA batteries.

"I didn't think it would fly so beautifully," said one of the students involved.

The team is hoping to have the flight recognized as a record by the Japan Aeronautic Association, the spokesman said.

challengemaster

god almighty...

Black Swan

Matrix copper top?

Ponster

Not so great when you see today's news :



"The National Safety Transportation Board thinks it's possible that lithium-ion batteries caused a fire that destroyed a United Parcel Service airplane on Feb 8, 2006. The FAA already bans non-rechargeable lithium batteries from air shipment because aircraft don't carry fire suppression equipment capable of extinguishing lithium fires. The interesting thing is: these batteries aren't being used or charged, they're just being shipped: spontaneous battery combustion. Is this something that happens in the back of computer stores, or just on airplanes?"

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/17/1857232

Ruu_Old

Ponster wrote:

Not so great when you ses today's news :



"The National Safety Transportation Board thinks it's possible that lithium-ion batteries caused a fire that destroyed a United Parcel Service airplane on Feb 8, 2006. The FAA already bans non-rechargeable lithium batteries from air shipment because aircraft don't carry fire suppression equipment capable of extinguishing lithium fires. The interesting thing is: these batteries aren't being used or charged, they're just being shipped: spontaneous battery combustion. Is this something that happens in the back of computer stores, or just on airplanes?"

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/17/1857232

Haha brilliant, back to the drawing board then.

The_Conductor

There have been a number of reports of lithium batteries in mobile phones (and laptops) spontaneously combusting too. In most cases the manufacturers try to say that it was inferior knock-off batteries at fault (then again, they would....)