EoW March 2013

Transatlantic Cable

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

The ‘Dreamliner’

safeguards for the batteries. ‘Fundamental questions’

The latest problems for the Boeing 787 centre on its battery and raise questions about regulators’ oversight of new technology. On 6 th 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 7 th January. But they have not yet established cause and e ect. In the New York Times for 23 rd 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

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.”

Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel

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March 2013