DGCA bars use of affected Apple MacBooks on board aircraft

The US aviation regulator, the FAA, earlier this month, placed a ban on travelling with the 15-inch MacBook Pros that Apple recalled in June 2019 as a part of the Macbook Recall 2019, for the risk of lithium battery that may overheat and flame up inside an aircraft. The affected MacBook Pro units were sold by Apple between September 2015 and February 2017. Apple had put out a recall page to validate which customers need the batteries of their laptops to be replaced. You can access the recall page here.

Last evening, the DGCA of India, issued an advisory, which requests customers to not bring to flight any affected laptops. This is the advisyry they put out on Twitter for the public.

a message from a general of civil aviation

But if someone does bring one of these laptops on board, they are not allowed to switch it on during any stage of the flight, as per the circular sent by DGCA to airlines.

Apple has sold approximately 432,000 affected laptops in the US and 26,000 in Canada. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency had already issued a warning about these MacBook Pro equipment at the beginning of the month. EU Airlines require devices fitted with recalled lithium-ion batteries to be switched off, and not powered or charged through the duration of flight. Australia and Singapore have also acted on the situation.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 phones were similarly banned from flights in 2016 after widespread reports of the lithium-ion batteries exploding surfaced.

Bottomline

If you have one of these 500K laptops, perhaps a good idea for you to walk to the Apple Store or authorised service centre and hand it in for fixing pretty soon. Although I am not sure how this ban would be implemented, I guess airlines would make a lot of announcements about this in the coming days to start. You might not want to be caught on the wrong end of this.