EoW March 2013

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March 2013 28
The ‘Dreamliner’
The latest problems for the Boeing 787 centre on its battery and
raise questions about regulators’ oversight of new technology.
On 6th February, the US Federal Aviation Administration
approved one ight of a 787 Dreamliner, the plane on which
Chicago-based Boeing has staked its reputation. The FAA
permitted the plane’s maker to return it from a painting facility
in Fort Worth, Texas, to the company’s plant in Seattle. The
agency did not approve any other ights, not even to conduct
tests on the lithium-ion batteries that are the focus of inquiries
in the United States and Japan into recent incidents with the
plane.
All 50 787s delivered to airlines worldwide were grounded in
mid-January. The single exception, a ight with a crew but no
passengers, came one day after the nation’s top transportation
safety o cial said that the FAA had, in 2007, accepted test
results from Boeing that failed to properly assess the risk of
smoke or re leaking from the batteries of the 787 jet then being
built.
Deborah Hersman, the chairwoman of the National
Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), told reporters that Boeing
had predicted on the basis of its own testing that the batteries
on the new planes were likely to emit smoke less than once in
every ten million ight hours – and gave no indication that the
batteries could erupt in ames.
But when the planes were placed in service, she said, the
batteries overheated and smoked twice and caused one
re in January of this year, after fewer than 100,000 hours
of commercial ights. “The assumptions used to certify the
batteries,”Ms Hersman said, “must be reconsidered.”
The NTSB has said its experts found evidence of short circuits
and uncontrolled overheating inside a re-ravaged battery
from a parked Japan Airlines 787 at Boston’s Logan Airport on
7th January. But they have not yet established cause and e ect.
In the New York Times for 23rd January, Jad Mouawad and
Christopher Drew supplied background on the contentious
batteries, which in December 2006 the FAA approved for use
by Airbus, the European plane maker. The 14-ounce lithium-ion
batteries were intended to provide standby power for the
emergency lighting system of the Toulouse, France-based
company’s new A380 jumbo jet. Ten months later, the Times
reporters wrote, the FAA allowed Boeing to use “the same
volatile type of battery” on its new 787 jet. But in Boeing’s case
the batteries weighed 63 pounds each, were to be used in
critical ight systems as well as to provide backup power, and
would be charged and discharged much more often. Yet the
agency employed identical language (it could have been “just
cut and pasted,” according to the Times ) in laying out the broad
safeguards for the batteries.
‘Fundamental questions’
In the view of Messrs Mouawad and Drew, the use of lithium-ion
batteries in the 787 raises fundamental questions about how
US regulators certify new technology and how they balance
advances in airplane design and engineering with ensuring
safety in commercial ying. These issues will be examined in a
federal investigation into what went wrong and at future Senate
hearings. (“Boeing’s Battery Problems Cast Doubt on Appraisal of
New Technologies”)
As noted by the Times, the FAA said that, when in 2007 it
approved Boeing’s request to use lithium-ion batteries,
the agency had limited experience with their behaviour in
commercial aircraft. It did acknowledge that the batteries
themselves were more prone to re than traditional nickel-
cadmium or lead-acid batteries.
Experts interviewed by the Times said that, regardless of the cause
of the 787’s problems, the charred remains of the battery that
caught re in the plane in Boston raised the question of whether
the safeguards functioned properly. The NTSB said that all eight
cells in the battery had sustained “varying degrees of thermal
damage.” Six of them have been scanned and disassembled for
further examination.
† In a contrarian vein, many battery experts told the Times
reporters that they viewed Boeing’s decision to use
lithium-ion batteries as a reasonable one and pointed out
that lithium-ion batteries had been used in expensive space
satellites since around 2000 without serious problems.
They said that this track record would have added to the
con dence Boeing and federal regulators had about using
them in commercial airliners.
Jay F Whitacre, an associate professor of engineering at
Carnegie Mellon University, said that GS Yuasa, the Japanese
company that built the 787 batteries, told the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in a 2008
presentation that it had already supplied batteries for six
satellites and had contracts for 50 more. GS Yuasa also said
that its satellite batteries had never had a shorting incident
in more than ten years of production.
“That’s pretty compelling,” Professor Whitacre told the New
York Times. “If I had all that data and saw that they were
making batteries for 50 more satellites, I’d say that was a
reasonable risk to take. My sense is that Boeing did a fairly
decent job of picking the right company.”
Transatlantic Cable
Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel