Boeing Dreamliner Catches Fire In Boston

19061969 writes "The BBC reports that a Boeing 787 Dreamliner caught fire in Boston. Carter Leake, an analyst at BB&T Capital Markets in Virginia, said, 'I don't want to be an alarmist, but onboard fires on airplanes are as bad as it gets.' This represents bad news for Boeing especially after the FAA identified errors in the assembly of fuel line couplings in the Dreamliner."

Comments

With one fire

[Cryacin]

The dreamliner turns into a nightmare. Film at 11.

Re:With one fire

[Richard_at_work]

Every commercial plane is "one of the most sophisticated" when its first created, as no customer will accept last years technology with last years performance.

That said, there have been plenty of issues on the 787 which should not have made it to production - the QA issues that have hit over a dozen aircraft, numerous technical faults and electrical system issues etc etc etc. These are the things that the route proving part of the flight test regime are meant to find, but for some reason they haven't. If this most recent fire is due to a design fault rather than a production fault, then the FAA will be looking at their certification requirements more stringently, as they were updated for the 787s certification requirements.

Re:With one fire

[Anonymous Coward]

... there have been plenty of issues on the 787 which should not have made it to production - the QA issues that have hit over a dozen aircraft, numerous technical faults and electrical system issues etc etc etc.

I fully agree. Yes, all planes have issues when they're first deployed. For example, it was discovered that some parts of the wing structure on the A380 needed to be strengthened in order to meet the fatigue lifetime. However, this is not the kind of thing that would have caused failures in flight - it's a long term fatigue issue that was discovered years before it would have caused a problem. Issues like this are common since strength/fatigue vs. weight is such a difficult compromise on aircraft. 787 issues have been more the kind of thing that should have been fixed during design and testing.

The problem with the 787, and the reason that it was years behind schedule and has so many problems, is that the executive geniuses at Boeing decided to outsource as much of the engineering as they could ("outsource" here referring to both domestic and offshore outsourcing). Many of the companies that engineering was outsourced to simply didn't have the expertise. Large airliners are not exactly the kind of thing that every job shop and subcontractor has the know-how to design. There are only two companies worth mentioning in the world that do.

The only way they got the 787 out the door at all (and stemmed the financial bleeding of Boeing) was by taking emergency steps to find a large cadre of engineers who had decades of deep experience in airliner design. They found them at (surprise, surprise) Boeing! Golly, you mean there was some wisdom to the way the world's most successful airliner manufacturer has designed planes for decades? Whodda thunk it? No doubt the top execs at Boeing will get large bonuses for discovering this brilliant last minute solution, and blame Boeing engineering for the problems that do remain.

Re:With one fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes- this ^

I live in Boeing's former home town (Seattle) and it may be sour grapes, but the buzz I hear here is that the other/new assembly site in South Carolina is an amateur hour kind of thing. Boeing set up shop there because of the union workers here, and the quality went away. I hear from labor and management folks both that Boeing is no longer in the aircraft business- they are now in the vendor management business, and there are no effective mechanisms for enforcing quality or delivery timeframes.

Re:With one fire

[Richard_at_work]

The problem is, there are categories of problems which are acceptable to find after certification, and there are categories of problems which are not acceptable to find after certification - fatigue life issues that manifest after the initial certified inspection window (the window between certification and the first deep inspection of the first inservice airframes) are acceptable, because they do not pose an undue risk to the aircraft before they can be discovered. This is because the fatigue testing of a new airframe design continues well beyond that of the certification testing, which only tests for such things as ultimate strength etc while fatigue life, inspection periods etc are done off the basis of longer term testing.

Components causing fires are in the category of things that should have been discovered during the certification period - there should be no risk from components like that for inservice aircraft, thats the point of certifying the compoments...

Out of all the problems the Boeing 787 has suffered over its so far short life, the bulk of them have not been engineering issues - only two major issues have been linked to engineering quality, and that is the side of body join problem and the initial arcing problem which caused the first airborne 787 fire during testing.

The 787s wing, designed and built by the Japanese, has proven to be better than expected spec wise.

The 787 fuselage sections built by Spirit have proven to be bang on spec.

There have been a few QA issues with the empennage and other parts, but nothing major.

The major problems stem from the decision to roll out the 787 as an essentially mocked up CFRP model on the 7/8/07 - rather than wait for the build process to proceed in the planned stages, management pushed for the aircraft to be ready for the public reveal. This lead to non-aviation-grade materials to be used to mock it up, and the aircraft had to be essentially rebuilt in the most difficult way possible afterward. This management decision made a 3 month delay into a 18 month delay.

Re:With one fire

[Martin Blank]

There was an article a couple of years ago where Boeing said that "the process is the product." They truly believed that managing the process of building the plane was a more important product over the plane itself. I've seen so much of this kind of thing that I used it as an example of process management gone wrong where I worked, and it triggered an interesting discussion and some changes in how IT marketed itself to the rest of the enterprise.

Lithium ion battery

[Dan East]

It was one of the two large lithium ion battery packs the power the plane when the engines are off. The FCC and pilots were already concerned about the use of lithium ion batteries for this purpose (apparently it's a first), and they issued special regulations just for this plane.

Also the only person on board when this happened was a mechanic (which is probably a good thing at least someone was able to spot the smoke right away).

Re:Lithium ion battery

[SternisheFan]

It could've been worse, at least the battery fire occured after it landed. Statistically speaking, flying in an airplane is still far safer than flying in your own bathtub.

Re:Lithium ion battery

[YrWrstNtmr]

...but I have thrown out a NiCad that was swelling and smelling. Yes, I mean thrown out, from 35,000 ft, somewhere over the North Atlantic. Glad we had a door that opened in.

Uh huh. Sure you did.

Re:Lithium ion battery

[VorpalRodent]

I was considering lauding your rigorous statistics, but I can't find anything to support it. The closest thing I can find is the fact that there have been zero deaths of human cannonballs in the last 18 months. This suggests to me that flying in nothing at all is better than flying in an airplane. While ducks and other seasonal game may disagree on the point, I would think that most other birds would agree that plane-less flight is actually safer on a per-mile basis.

Besides, bathtubs can't fly. That's just silly.

Re:Titanic

[webmistressrachel]

| "onboard fires on airplanes are as bad as it gets"

Hmm... I'm sure a missing wing, or rapid loss of pressure due to a collision, or massive power failure, or lots of other things could be a lot worse than a battery fire.

Am I correct in assuming TFA doesn't know what on earth (or off it) they're on about?

Re:MSM Strikes Again

[Dupple]

From TFA

"The fire started after a battery in the jet's auxiliary power system overheated."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20942484

Re:Titanic

[SomePgmr]

Yeah I'd say, "The airline said that no passengers or crew members were hurt as they had already disembarked." puts the kibosh on "as bad as it gets [on airplanes]".

Re:MSM Strikes Again

[Rich0]

If leaving an APU turned on causes a catastrophic loss of the aircraft, then there is a design flaw.

However, I don't see how leaving one on should cause a battery to overheat. The batteries should be on circuits that limit currents appropriately, whether charging or discharging. This is an aircraft - not a plastic toy.

Re:A bit alarmist and FUD

[tompaulco]

Citing a thing like "FAA identified errors in the assembly of fuel line couplings in the Dreamliner." when the actual fire, according to this morning's Boston Globe, was "[a] Small electrical fire..."
This article brought to you by Airbus Industries.

Re:MSM Strikes Again

[Richard_at_work]

The aircraft wasn't departing, it had just arrived and the passengers and crew had deplaned.

Also, no certified crew on a commercial carrier leaves the APU running after its needed - it takes up substantially more than a "tiny fraction of fuel" and leaving it on for even a short haul flight can cost the operator thousands of dollars in extra fuel costs for just that one flight.

Here's a more educated guess: faulty battery underwent thermal runaway and caught fire, causing a minor explosion and a heck of a lot of smoke.

Makes you wish

[Quila]

you could open a window

Re:Titanic

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear passengers: I have bad and good news for you. The bad news: we lost a wing. The good news: it was on fire anyway.

Re:MSM Strikes Again

[Nidi62]

Totally unqualified "educated" guess: crew left the APU on even though it's supposed to be off after the engines are up to speed?

From what simulation and speaking with pilots I've gathered, usually you are "supposed" to turn the APU off after engine starts, though usually this is not done as it consumes a tiny fraction of fuel and gives you some wiggle room in the event of an engine failure.

Seeing as how the plane was at the gate and the passengers from the ariving flight had deplaned, the engines better not have been up to speed or they would have had bigger problems. Usually if the APU is on while in the gate, it is because ground power is not available. This can happen, but running the APU is much more expensive than electrical ground power. As an educated guess (since I actually work on a ramp) I would assume the APU was not on. If the APU wasn't on, then a fire in the APU battery is definitely not good.

Re:Titanic

[LeadSongDog]

Stop, you're both wrong.
1. This is not, by definition, an aviation accident: even the crew had deplaned.
2. Many parked aircraft have lost wings without crashing: all it takes is wind passing over the tarmac on the wrong vector.
3. A fire, even in flight, doesn't have to be the end of the world if the systems design detects the fire and limits its ability to spread. This was the principal lesson-learned from SR111, which has since changed material approvals for aircraft. SA295 was never adequately explained, so teaches us little, but evidently the firefighting routines were not followed. VJ592 was caused by illegally carried hazmat (oxygen generators) in the cabin. AC797 had many similarities to SR111 (insulation burning spread the fire), but the lessons learned were not applied to designs in time to prevent SR111. I'd blame the FAA's inaction on NTSB recommendations.

Re:Titanic

[bigdanmoody]

Indeed, as a former aircraft mechanic, I know that all of the planes that I've worked on have taken fire safety very seriously. The Dash-8's that I've worked on have their batteries placed outside of the pressure vessel. Although I have not personally worked on a plane that uses Li-Ion batteries like the 787 does, my understanding is that aircraft that do use these batteries have numerous warning and safety features to prevent thermal runaway, which sounds like what happened here. Based on the very limited information in TFA, I hypothesize that if the flight crew had been on board, they would have noticed a battery overheat condition and could have taken appropriate action well before a fire broke out.

Another One Today

[MichaelJ]

Another Dreamliner just got a fuel leak and dumped a good mess all over a taxiway at Logan until the engine was shut down. Not a good week for 787s in Boston.