Have you ever seen a battery fire? A real one. A big one. Not a dramatic YouTube clip, but the real thing—your neighbor’s Tesla burning like the gates of hell have swung open, spewing toxic fumes unlike anything you’ve ever seen or smelled before. Acrid, choking, wrong on a primal level.
Those fires are bad. Really bad. So bad that you can’t actually extinguish them. The reason is simple and deeply inconvenient: what’s burning doesn’t need air as an oxidizer. The fuel and the oxidizer are neatly packaged together. That’s why firefighters almost always choose one of two options—if they’re lucky, they submerge the entire burning vehicle into a container filled with water. If they’re not, they establish a perimeter, keep people away, and let it burn.
Sometimes for days.
Even when a battery is fully submerged for a week, reignition after draining the water is common. Once the internal chemistry runs away, that’s it. There is no “putting it out.” The fire just waits.
That is bad enough in a car. In theory, you might get out in time. Sometimes people do. Often, they don’t. They inhale toxic fumes, they’re trapped, or the fire escalates faster than human reaction time allows. You burn. Still, at least there is a chance—however slim—to escape.
Not in an airplane.
If this happens at 15,000 feet and a battery pack starts to burn, you are done. There is nothing to switch off. Nothing to isolate. Nothing to mitigate. No emergency procedure that solves the underlying problem. You don’t glide to safety. You don’t land “as soon as practicable.” You burn. With absolute certainty. You burn to death.
“But that won’t happen,” you say.
Really? Have you looked at how often it already happens in small cars? Have you watched an electric bus burn? Not a minor incident—a full battery event. Now multiply that battery mass by a hundred. Or more. Then put it in the air. In a pressurized tube. With no exits.
If I know a plane is electric, I don’t board the flight. Full stop. Some technologies fail gracefully. Batteries don’t. And at altitude, there is no margin for faith-based engineering.