This is a pretty snarky and relatively uneducational article. A lot of speculation, some ignorant rambling (nobody at The Atlantic seems to know where electrical power on a plane actually comes from), and a lot of misplaced vitriol. You'd think people would be grateful that airlines are offering standard electric outlets on the plane at all.
The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#42Makes you wonder how they even manage to power those 500 Watt aircraft headlight bulbs, tens of KW in avionics, coffee machines and kettles, ovens, in-flight entertainment system per every seat etc etc
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#43Since every laptop has a battery, you could do "rolling blackouts". The laptop doesn't need power the whole flight. I know from going to conferences sometimes just plugging in once in the middle of the day allowed me to make it without being plugged in for the rest of the day.
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#44If 110V is not feasible, can we try lower voltage? 36V DC is sufficient for laptops with correct adapters. Also I don't really want to work on laptops in tight space anyway. A 5V USB port is sufficient. All Air Canada flights have this. (Due to RIM I guess?)
All the Air Canada flights I've flown from YVR have a 110 plug too. I've no idea what the voltage/current actually is, but it charges my laptop just fine. (There's generally only one plug for every 2 or 3 seats though.)
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because somebody would plug in something dangerous. Believe me there would be some genius with a George Forman plugin grill or similar. There are DC adapter plugins in aircraft - the idea is that they are only sold for laptops and are expensive enough that few people use the.
It would appear to me that most of the stupid stuff you could plug into a cigarette lighter pales in comparison to the stupid stuff that you can plug into a 120V AC. (eg. You're more likely to find a 120V AC plug on the aforementioned George Foreman grill)
Yep. And this is the reason that all the sockets have built-in current protection. Additionally, there are circuit breakers per seat row, which is what I discovered when I tried plugging in my 110W laptop power adapter into one of them. The other passengers on the seat row were not happy when the flight attendant said that they were not allowed to reset the breakers. Another lesson learnt - bring a lower power adapter. :(
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because somebody would plug in something dangerous. Believe me there would be some genius with a George Forman plugin grill or similar. There are DC adapter plugins in aircraft - the idea is that they are only sold for laptops and are expensive enough that few people use the.
It would appear to me that most of the stupid stuff you could plug into a cigarette lighter pales in comparison to the stupid stuff that you can plug into a 120V AC. (eg. You're more likely to find a 120V AC plug on the aforementioned George Foreman grill)
Perhaps this would be (or would be posed as) a security problem, too.
I am not familiar with any specific methods of causing a large explosion that access to a 120V AC socket would allow, which not having access to one would not, with what is currently allowed to passengers through airport security [0]; But considering that producing a cigarette lighter or some nail polish remover in the cabin are grounds to be tackled by an air marshal and prosecuted, an electrical outlet is a hell of a lot of accessible power.
[0] kindly disregard my past five minutes' search history, NSA snifferRe: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switch-mode power supplies are essentially DC rectifiers, which will never ever give you 110V, 60Hz (an AC voltage). One way to change the frequency of a power source is through a double-conversion type AC/AC converter, i.e. 1st stage is a rectifier which outputs a DC voltage - this is an arbitrary DC voltage, but it needs to be within the voltage tolerances of the 2nd stage - an inverter, which reconstructs an AC vo…
A switch mode power supply can do a whole lot more than act as a rectifier. "Switch mode" refers to the turning on and off of numerous silicon switches usually connected to some kind of LC energy storage/filter, and this is the basis of modern rectifiers, inverters, step-up and step-down converters, etc. It is in fact possible to use a switching circuit to convert an arbitrary ac voltage/frequency to another arbitrar…
Fair enough, although I've never actually seen an AC/AC converter without a DC link in real life (the closest thing probably being a direct torque control VSD).
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#48Makes you wonder how they even manage to power those 500 Watt aircraft headlight bulbs, tens of KW in avionics, coffee machines and kettles, ovens, in-flight entertainment system per every seat etc etc
Because a) they know at the time the plane is designed the exact power draw of all those bits of kit and b) said bits of kit can be designed from the ground up to play nicely with aircraft power supplies.
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#49Here's my personal solution. It works for all airlines. It can also power my Cradlepoint 4G hotspot and recharge my iPad, iPhone, and any device using USB power. http://www.tekkeon.com/products-mypowerall.html I bought a male Adaptaplug and a Magsafe cord from eBay, and after 5 minutes with a soldering iron, it works for my 13" unibody MacBook as well. I plan on upgrading to a 13" MacBook Air soon. I should be able t…
Thanks -- I've been looking for one of these ever since APC stopped making theirs about four years ago.
Re: The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat
#50Even though the articles claims that its a worst case scenario, most people on an airplane wouldn't use their 19", 8kg über-gaming laptop. Most people would probably use more portable versions, ending up in a avarage effect that is way, way below 220W.