"RK Henry" wrote in message
...
I've never had a battery just die. It usually exhibits its death
throes for months, giving plenty of time to shop Trade-A-Plane for the
best price.

I've had it happen with a car battery before... Starting my car after work,
it turned over normally and I thought that it had started and released the
key... Turned out that I had done it too quick and the car hadn't started...
Tried to start it again and all I got was a slight clicking noise... Just
barely enough juice to make the lights on the radio dimly glow... Car
batteries are not any different than aircraft batteries... Same basic
technology, thus same failure modes... Yeah, it could happen on an aircraft
battery also... My experience though is that this sort of failure mode is
rather rare since I've only had this sort of thing happen once for any
vehicle battery that I ever owned...