The nation’s top transportation safety official said on Thursday that the Federal Aviation Administration accepted test results from Boeing in 2007 that failed to properly assess the risks of smoke or fire from the batteries on Boeing’s new 787 jets.
Deborah Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters that the problems seemed to have originated in the battery, when one of the eight cells had a short circuit and the fire spread to the rest of the cells. But she said that Boeing’s tests showed no indication that the new lithium-ion batteries on its 787 planes could erupt in flame and concluded that they were likely to emit smoke less than once in every 10 million flight hours.
Once the planes were placed in service, though, the batteries overheated and emitted smoke twice last month, and caused one fire, after about 50,000 hours of commercial flights.
“The assumptions used to certify the batteries must be reconsidered,” Ms. Hersman said.
Finally, somebody is watching the watchers. This is a very fortunate airline safety issue, given that it didn’t take a tragedy for the flaws in the system to be exposed. However, tragedies also lead to greater systemic overhauls and we can only hope that they won’t fall by the wayside here with a “Well, nobody got hurt” attitude.
What is disappointing is that she decided to comment before a cause is known. Say, isn’t she up for a cabinet job? Besides, Boeing has been on the WH drone list since they decided to build the planes in a right to work state, remember?
The cause—which I assume you mean is “why one battery caught on fire”—is entirely irrelevant to the greater point made a little further in the article, which is also the point Elon Musk has been making:
It’s the cascade to other cells that makes this very very dangerous, its something the battery pack design must prevent and supposedly did prevent. For more on this, look at Cessna’s adventures with lithium batteries, which also started with a non-fatal fire on the ground in 2001.
NTSB used to be an admirably tight-lipped organization. They would do an investigation of a mishap (plane crash, train derailment, pipeline rupture), disappear into their offices, and announce findings six months or a year later. They bluntly didn’t give a damn what the media wanted and their findings were rational and trustworthy.
Nowadays, they’re in front of the cameras more than the FAA is and faster. Investigaton results are preliminary and subject to change.
In between accidents, they pander to the press with regular lists of ‘safety recommendations’ that pay no attention to practicality, cost/benefit, or even smell.
I find little to criticize in her remarks – when observed data is radically different than initial assumptions,
Obviously the assumptions were wrong. When safety is concerned, we should know why Boeing
Simply assumed everything with these batteries was going to work out.
It may turn out that the entire lithium-ion battery technology has been vastly overhyped
And the 787, along with all other Li batteries, is simply unfit for public service as currently designed.
So, 1 fire in 1 parked aircraft leads to grounding of the entire fleet.
Then why is the obama-motors Volt still allowed to drive after several fires in several parked vehicles?
It’s a lot easier to get out of a burning car on the ground than it is to get out of a burning plane at 35,000 feet.
And the cost of a Volt is significantly less than that of a Dreamliner plus passengers.
IIRC a fire in torpedo batteries led to the loss of USS Scorpion.
Mark E.: What’s the difference between a car burning on the side of the road and a passenger jet burning at 30,000 feet?
Disappointing to see PJ taking a decidedly NON-CONSERVATIVE position on this. There is no justification whatsoever for having NTSB oversee the safety decisions of an airplane manufacturer that has every incentive to build its planes to a very high standard of safety. The government’s only role here should be investigative after the fact, to find out what went wrong in a particular accident and inform the industry of its findings. The only enforcement mechanism required for the private actors is their already huge civil liability. So no, it is not good that the bureaucrats are using their failure to detect a flaw as an excuse to over-expand their role still further.
An NTSB report cannot be used as evidence, and that is to get honest answers and discover what went wrong so that changes can be made to prevent that failure. From the article it sounds like Boeing and the FAA had decided the batteries were sufficiently robust; from the article the NTSB report concludes that the batteries were not sufficiently robust.
Time to change the batteries to a different type or re-design them. That sounds like a conservative result to me.