Ok I had a quick look at the specification of the batteries and here are my remarks:

If we consider that the venting system is only driven by the temperature differential, then the cooling valve open and close on a specif amount of time.

For example, if DeltaT=A, the orifice will open a certain amount of time t depending on the surface of the venting hole.
But if the outside pressure is decreased quickly (the thermal barrier of the packaging material might have played its part here also) and far bellow the design level, then as the time t is kept at its initial value, instead of discharging at a certain amount of flux (depending of the initial design ), the discharged flow is accelerated by the lower outside pressure with a speed V greater than the design value.
This tends to augment the temperature of the heated flows passing trough the opercule (T=P/rho ).
The heated flow will increase the inner batteries temperature, in turn augmenting the time the batteries valve will stay open.

We then have a cascading event that will end only either with a full gas discharge of the batteries, or by a spontaneous inflammation (lithium/carbon/plastics zipping point).

What we may conclude is that the crew and passengers might have been incapacitated by the toxic gazes (arsenic) or had to face a rapidly growing fire in the cargo bay with heavy smokes (plastics and carbon) and high temperature (lithium). This means that part of hull might have been very quickly breached (aluminium melting) with a large aerodynamics load impacting the trim of the airplane. We may suppose that the first reaction of the crew will have been to focus on manning the airplane and to shut all electrical sources or even climb to extinguish the fire as it was proposed earlier, but this,again, is only wild assumptions.

If I am right (that means that there is no pressure driven variable in the soft regulating the batteries) , what is urgently needed to prevent that scenario of events to happen again and be retrofitted at low cost, is either to add a pressure regulator with a pressure sensing device (an accelerometer dug in the outside skin for example) or to build a cheap sealed flight box with a regulating valve where to mandatory put electronics equipment for air shipping.

Edit:
For a better understanding, have a look here (source http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/)

NATO member pressed to increase military spending

Obama has also warned NATO member nations that, given Russia’s ambitions, each must also contribute fairly to the group’s defense, including more spending and new commitments of military resources.

Echoing that message, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday that NATO members will be “judged harshly” if they do not increase defense spending in response to the new Russian threat.

“For decades — from the early days of the Cold War — American defense secretaries have called on European allies to ramp up their defense investment,” Hagel said in a speech at the Wilson Center.

Source:

The Washington Post

Also at 44:00 discussion around the hook problem: what it was and how easily it was solved (a thought on the heated debate around it with all the bashing around LM supposed poor engineering performance)

GlobalSecurity.Org reports that Kiev is re-instating military conscription.

ROFL nearly spit out my (late) morning cofe:

Are the angry Russians already celebrating the 1st May in Italy ?

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and the inherent designs we know off have no problem in being scaled up to meet that requirement..

I am not sure of that. Especially regarding carrier requirements. At least for the design we have seen so far.

TomcatVip,

Can you elaborate on that ?

Highly conjunctural…

As for the winders, you can see them carried in most other wind tunnel tests (some fairly recent) and they were carried for many weapon clearance flights (Alenia/Storm Shadow being the latest), so I would guess that they are used for the baseline aerodynamic configuration, as opposed to ASRAAM or IRIS-T.

Bear in mind that Aim-9L was integrated before ASRAAM or IRIS-T, and was carried for much of the original envelope expansion work, so perhaps it’s down to avoiding redoing expensive flight test work that was performed with Aim-9’s carried ?

Yes