Boeing 787 grounded
 

Japan has grounded all Dreamliners after a battery fire. It is not the first serious incident with Boeing new dream which now threatens to become an expensive nigthmare for Boeing. On Professional Pilots rumour Network, and internet platform for professional pilots, many pros express doubts on the concept of the new airplane.

The new Boeing is heavily depending on use of lithium ion batteries, far more than other airplanes since it has replaced many hydraulic and mechanical systems with electrical ones. Some pilots expressed concerns over putting so many of these batteries, which are known to explode and go up in flames occasionally in laptops, cellphones and pedelecs as well, into an airframe "largly made of plastic". The general design of these batteries and their isolation is being doubted, too.

Also, dissatisfaction with Boeings' crisis management is being voiced, too, saying that they made no progress, whereas Airbus with intial problems with its A380 step by step adressed them and cleaned them up. Sinc ethe serial production has been driven up by Boeing recently, the hiuger production activity also is assumed to have something to do with insufficient quality of components, some pilots assume.

In the worst scenario, the electrical design of the Dreamliner is insufficient and the batteries cannot be used. In this case, Boeing practically would need to replace the e-system and design a new Dreamliner around the replacement system.

In the imminent past, several Dreamliners ran into problems, from cracks in the cockpit windows and failing generators over failures in the braking system and engine problems to fires in the freight compartment and melting battery and cable isolations. Many of these incidents were not taken note of by a wide public, but some of them led to emergency landings by Dreamliners.

Also noteworthy is that due to the heavy dependency on electrical power, these new batteries represent a new technological design with specifications for which no previous certification standards existed. The negotations between Boeing and the American authorities were unusually long over these items alone, and in principle the batteries are not properly certified by the authority on grounds on any proven standards.

Some pilots get quoted with making their position clear: "If it is Boeing, I am not going."

I wonder if "new materials" maybe get overestimated in the industry, and their longevity and robustness gets overestimated. I think of the unforseen microcracks building in the wings and airframe of the A380, but Boeings as well.
American and Japanese authorities are running investigations. I think the Poles are about to do that as well. So far, some 40 787s are in service wordwide.

Just in: the US now have grounded all B787s, too.

Update: The US has also grounded their 787 fleet over the battery failure risk.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21054089

It's not good publicity for Boeing, that much is certain, and this battery design could be the undoing of the 787. I think the major selling point of the 787 was its low fuel consumption rate and light rate materials used, which in this world of high oil prices is a boon for the smaller air companies looking to skim a little extra profits from their flights. Airbus went in a different direction with the A380 by offering to put more fee paying passengers into the same journey.
However, it's certainly having a bad start, Boeing has a very loyal customer base, so I can't see it suffering unduly from this, and they still have the 767 and 777 designs which are tried and tested, but in a world where Airbus is looking to seize the initiative in aircraft design, this is not a good advertisement. Still, unless it's the entire electrical system design that's at fault then this is something that can be rectified, the A380 wasn't perfect at launch either, just ask Quantas.

Personally though, I think that the future of airline technology may come from Japan, or more specifically, their space agency, JAXA which has some interesting super and hypersonic design proposals that it hopes to get into action by the middle of the century. Time will tell, who knows, perhaps by then I'll have actually flown in something that is not on a computer screen. Although God help us all if I'm the one flying it! :haha:


EDIT: Sniped by a whole ten minutes, that's what I get for rambling and stopping to check the specs of the A380 and 787!

Yes, but you actually provided a link.

Better to be safe than sorry.

I can tell you're not Australian :O:

I thought I read the other day they'd been grounded over all the previous emergency landings et al, maybe that was individual airlines.

Oberon, the A380 didn't cause Qantas to fail, Qantas caused Qantas to fail :)

Grounded in Europe now also - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21054089

This is very bad news for Boeing. The plane is still very much in demand, I don't think we'll see orders cancelled over this. But a string of entry-into-service problems is really just the icing on the cake of a troubled design and manufacturing process.

A lot of the incidents over the last couple of weeks are totally routine (brakes, fuel leak) and would never have made the non-industry news had they not happened to a 787, but there are also some points of concern.

As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, it's time to let the engineers get to work and get them flying again!

Poland's LOT announced today that they will sue Boeing for compensation.

Regarding Oberon's comment, just recently Boeing has re-taken the crown from Airbus again and was seen in a trend to re-claim lead position for the forseeable future. In the past two or three years, Airbus had the lead by a narrow marginThe A380 is not in high demand, and the impression was that the Europeans may have made a politically ambitioned miscalculation when doing a plane this big: the political interference at Airbus is immense and the criticism is voiced that politicians wanted to show the Americans that they can build "the biggest". Economic reason and demand maybe had less with it to do than was economically healthy.

The race between Airbus and Boeing is extremely tight, however.

There is a lot at stake for Boeing having seen orders for over 800 units thus far.

Hopefully these are just teething problems that can be ironed out.

Most likely
This media hysteria and over dramatisation dates back with almost all popular airliners.
Yet some bad publicity is not bad in such cases since in puts a lot pressure on the companies involved to deal with the issues.

Der Spiegel now has picked up the story, confirming what I said yesterday.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-878160.html

:hmmm:
what about that german that reported a crack in the window developping in flight?

Plastick wrap planes on batteries...:timeout:

787 got grazie.
but i would not want to be in one.:down:

I have not heard of "a German" reporting that, I only heard of an incident with a developing crack in the cockpit window. Which means that it was either the pilot or the copilot reporting it.

In Europe, the Poles are the only 787 operators so far.

Cracks in the windscreen of an aircraft are not that uncommon. At least one or two occurred a week on C-5s and C-17s where I was stationed they actually make a special kind of tape that can be used for certain kinds of cracks in lieu of replacing the entire section of windscreen.

All new aircraft have teething troubles some have more than others nothing to see here but the media making mountains out of mole hills.

And they are making claims for compensation already.

As usual the media has blown it way out of proportion.

An emergency Airworthiness Directive(AD) on the lithium ion batteries is the only thing that grounded the airplane. The AD reads "prior to further flight modify the battery system." Boeing and the FAA will work out how that is to be done and the AD will be modified.
I'm not sure, but I would bet other country's aviation regulatory bodies have issued their versions of an emergency AD as well.

For those that do not know, AD's are a part(FAR 39 to be exact) of the FAR's(Federal Aviation Regulations) and are mandatory. If you do not comply with any AD, your airplane is unairworthy and not legal to fly. Period.
An emergency AD is pretty extreme and does not happen very often, and almost all of them will say "Prior to further flight, fix the ...." Normal AD's will have a certain length of time(flight hours, days, months) to fix the problem after the date they become effective.


I laugh everytime I've read "United(or insert other airline here) has decided to comply with the FAA instructions", like they really have a choice! A private owner might be able to ignore an AD at his own risk, but a airline operator or charter operator will face certificate revocation and heavy fines if they tried to pull that.

The other issues-fuel leaks, window cracks, and the other things mentioned are probably just teething troubles of a new airplane design.

:)

Yeah, it is more common than people think. I've seen a couple of our King Airs come in with a shattered outer pane of the windshield. No structural proplems at all. Of course the pilots get real nervous and they cinch their shoulder harnesses up real tight and they spend a few minutes pulling their underwear out of their butt cracks. :D

Small cracks and delaminations may be acceptable depending on where they are. Most heated windshields of pressurized aircraft have an inner pane and an outer pane. Alot of times a crack or delamination in the outer pane is acceptable as long as the heat still works and it does not obstruct the pilot's view.

:)

Who said that the plane has not been grounded over anything else but the battery issue? The other technical problems have been listed for reasons of completeness. They form a history until here, however. They might have been "teething problems". But the battery issue is not of that mild category. It could indicate major trouble.

However, the battery system on the 787 is like the primary aorta, and the jet's whole design philosophy stands and falls with electricity being available in batteries in much higher quantities than in other jets of that size. Several conventional systems have been replaced by new, electrical ones. Take the battery design out of the formula - and the whole concept threatens to collapses. So, the issue is by far not that harmless a teething problem as you make it appear, even more so when considering that lithium ion batteries are known notorious trouble makers: in cellphones, in laptops, in pedelecs. Whole production models of these items had to be called back by manufacturers in the past due to the battery having demonstrated go up in flames. They simply are not as stable than conventional batteries are. Several fires and molten isolations due to overheating batteries have rang emergency bells for the Dreamliner. If you repalce the lithium ion batteries against conventional ones, and in quantities that are needed to compensate the lighter lithium ion's total capacity, than you mean to attach significantly more weight to the plane (if the installed electrical circuits and systems can be made compatible with a new battery type in bigger quantities) This means major redesign work for the engineers. If parts of the electrical system even must be replaced, than we talk about major design changes that the engineers need to do. And then we talk about a very different and in principle: a new Dreamliner. The major argument for it - reducend fuel costs due to lighter weight - also is effected. The electrical innovations are said to have a total effect of reducing fuel by 4-8%. Take the innovations away, and you have a plane that needs as much more fuel. And that is when the carriers' bureaucrats starts to use their pocket calculators. They are pedantic about even less meaningful details, for example whether to fly with a cost index of 20, 40, or 60. Having simulated these differences nows I know that regarding fuel used per hour, the difference in the end result is minimal. But for carriers, it is pure money.

The battery issue may be the only issue for which the planes now got grounded, but it is a very major issue, that has led to fires repeatedly, and that has the potential to leave a major mark in the financial records of Boeing.