A thought

My upcoming international air travel has set a tiny, tiny seed of worry in my belly. I mean, the news from the world of aviation lately is not good; if it's not potentially deadly toiletries, it's an odd change to runway patterning in Kentucky that ends in disaster. J assures me that the hoo-ha over flying is much more subdued in the rest of Europe than it is in the UK, let alone the US, and adds that he's sure my flight from Frankfurt to Milan will be wildly uneventful. Fingers crossed, then, for the SFO-Chicago and Chicago-Frankfurt portions of my journey.

Anyway, I read a quote in yesterday's Times business section from some travelling businessman or other in which he said, essentially, that if airlines were ever to ban the use of laptops and other electronics on board, he'd need to be forcibly sedated in order to fly. This led me to think about the preponderance of laptops on any given flight, a good number of which must surely be either Dells or Macs. Given the recent spate of battery woes with both companies' machines, does it not follow that the probabilty of a laptop bursting into flames due to a faulty battery would be far greater than the probability of my (or anyone else's) shampoo or toothpaste serving as the base of an explosive?

Just a thought.