If the Olympic Flame Never Goes Out – How do you Transport it on an Airplane?

Sometimes us hazmat/DG geeks get to be involved with things that enter the public consciousness more than the ubiquitous lithium battery topics.

Recently, the world has been focused on the Paris Olympics. It seemed worth mentioning that the Olympics and the world of Dangerous Goods transport intersect every time they are held.

Many of you in our DG training audience might wonder about just how a flame – a torch – that is never supposed to be extinguished, actually ends up being transported safely aboard an aircraft where surface means of transport are just not practicable.

Actually, this brings up some other interesting sidebars which I will explain in this article about how you can actually have a lit torch and still render it safe for transport by air.

Let’s start with the specifics. The Olympic torch can be transported under special permits from the involved countries and utilizing a special provision published in the air regulations. The special provision is A324 in the IATA regulations and applies for the purpose of transporting a “symbolic flame”.

The appropriate competent authority of the States of origin and of the operator may approve the carriage of lamps fueled by UN 1223—Kerosene, or UN 3295—Hydrocarbons, liquid, n.o.s., carried by a passenger as carry-on baggage only.
Lamps must be of a “Davy” type or similar apparatus. We’ll talk about what a Davy lamp is, in a moment.

You can see from this image showing these types of lamps aboard a British Airways aircraft for transport to the London Olympics a while ago.

One of the interesting things about this – and you really don’t think about it until you start down this rabbit hole is, uh, what did people do a hundred years ago when they needed to use a torch or candle in a flammable environment?

Take coal mines for example or even swamps where there’s a lot of methane – prior to electric lamps just how DID they get light without blowing something up?

Enter the Davy Lamp; it’s an interesting back story and is an interesting trip back through time when you consider we’ve only had widespread use of electric lamps a bit more than 125 years.

Cheers!

Jim Powell, President, TDG LLC
Vice Chair DGTA Inc.

This little snippet of DG awareness is brought to you by www.dgtraining.com and the Dangerous Goods Trainers Association (www.dgta.org).