Crazy thing about these bags is that they're just containment. Once the thermal runaway has started, it's very hard to start as it brings its own oxygen, heat and fuel.
Hence why many places bring a container filled with water to extinguish an EV fire, and then probably send it to a wet shredder to make sure it doesn't re-ignite.
I am going to ask a question that I’m a little scared to ask because I suspect it’s really dumb, but here goes: is it at all feasible or practical to have a way to jettison a runaway battery from the aircraft? I guess most of the time the problems happen because nobody knows there’s a problem before it’s gotten too out of control for that.
My company distributed buckets filled with cat litter for containment to every branch office.
We cut the rate of fire (already low) in half by containing compromised batteries. It’s something like 0.02%-0.03% which is significant given the massive scope. Something like 200k devices and about 3% with battery issues of all types.
When you think about the number of flights, passengers with lithium batters and challenges of the airplane environment, it’s a hard problem. We’re lucky the engineering around these devices are as good as it is.