Ethiopian Airlines 777F caught on fire at Shanghai Pudong

Looks like a total loss of the plane!

smurfjed wrote: »

On a more serious note, what’s the chances that this was lithium batteries in the cargo.

A poster on AVH suggests Ethiopian has an operator prohibition on carriage of lithium batteries.

Bebop wrote: »

IMHO there are lots of undeclared Li-ion batteries being carried, I recently ordered one from Holland and it was delivered by an Post, it was the wrong size and I tried returning it but my Local post office refused to accept, I was told an Post do not carry these items, perhaps I should have lied on the declaration!

There's a couple of ways this can happen, one is an accidental failure to declare dangerous goods, this will get you a fine if you are caught, but it is hard on some ERP systems to properly track hazardous goods, and sometimes they slip through the net.

The other way is willful failure to declare to avail of cheaper postage rates, this is criminal and would result in serious consequences for whoever did it. Obv as we can see here it caused the complete loss of a plane, and they were lucky it occurred on the ground and there was no loss of life!