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Boeing 787 Dreamliner Grounded In US and EU
Some Bitch writes "Following previous stories that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was to review the safety of the Boeing 787 and that Japan had already grounded their fleet, the FAA has issued an airworthiness directive which has been endorsed around the world with the fleets of all eight airlines flying the 787 now grounded. EADS (the parent company of Airbus) shares were up 3.9% at close of business." General Electric's call for more sifting of more data from more sensors might have some resonance right now within Boeing.
How embarassing for Boeing to have a $200M plane grounded because of a battery problem. They should have bought quality OEM batteries instead of going for the cheap Chinese imports on EBay.
The battery issue is front and center as it should be - if you have seen images of the melted battery it's pretty scary. But there are OTHER issues as well, from leaky fuel lines to bubbles and delam issues in the compositesâ¦
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Sure, EADS's shares are up, and since their major competitor Boeing had bad news today, perhaps we can speculate that "EADS shares up on bad news for rival Boeing", as finance journalists like to speculate. But you know who else's shares went up today? Boeing's. The stock market is weird, and a lot of factors go into price movements.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
See http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/15/uk-boeing-dreamliner-ntsb-idUSLNE90E00Y20130115
This looks bad.
I hope Boeing can [manage|subcontract] themselves out of this before they go broke...
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
The A380's had quite a few missteps when they first went into service as well. Both are very new designs with a lot of new tech, sadly I am sure eventually one of them will be a fatal misstep, still won't stop me flying on them, I get an an A380 for a 17 hour flight in 2 days. I don't think I would be any less comfortable if it was a Dreamliner.
This plane uses a tremendous amount of electricity, see: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/01/boeing-787-electric-fire-grounding/
The li-ion batteries are from a company in Japan, but I wonder where they were manufactured. In the past, subcontractors outside Japan have done shoddy jobs making batteries, such as replacing mylar with paper. Once it's sealed up, how do you test it? Additionally, these batteries use cobolt oxide and are even more prone to overheating than tradition li-ion batteries. The batteries took a long time to certify.
A notorious SwissAir crash over the Atlantic was due to an overheated electrical bus. In a rush to get gambling devices onto seat backs, the airline had gone with a system that required a full computer for each display, which required more power than a more centralized system.
From the link: http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/the-787-dreamliner-scenario-how-data-can-solve-epic-messes/
"That’s supremely bad news for Boeing, which poured millions of dollars into the 787’s development."
No wonder its having issues. Or maybe Dr. Evil wrote this article?
They raised the alarm first because the aircraft that had to make an emergency landing was in Japan -- it has nothing to do with their air safety experts being better, just with them getting the first news of the problem.
Some problems, especially manufacturing defects, only manifest themselves with a large enough sample size. Presumably none of the aircraft they used for certification encountered this particular problem.
The Japanese grounding was not an aviation authority move, it was individual airlines taking the prudent step on their own and has happened several times for several different aircraft types (after the A380 engine failure, several airlines took their aircraft out of use for checks) - the big news here is that the FAA took a very big step in issuing a grounding order, its not one that happens often.
It really seems silly to me that they chose to use a lithium ion battery with a cobalt cathode for use as a critical component of an airplane. They are not environmentally friendly, prone to fire, and don't last as long as some other technologies. They could have gone with a Lithium Iron battery and been much safer and require less maintenance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery That would have only added about 18 pounds to the entire aircraft, certainly worth the greatly increased safety factor. Just goes to show that this plane was built to be a cheap as possible with only cursory regard to safety.
Working as a process development engineer, I can't tell you how many times I've run into a problem in high volume that didn't show it's head in testing. There are only so many variables you can test, especially if you have constraints to your sample size. From my experience major failures are never a single variable, but rather, an interaction between different variables that don't show statistical significance until you get a big enough sample.
15 years ago I worked putting together battery packs for small aircraft, and they were quite complicated, including heater elements and management electronics. I can only imagine how complex the systems are for something as large as a 787. The problem may not be with the actual battery, but the system which regulates the power.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
As everyone should know, modern airliners are pressurized. Now it is generally considered a BAD idea if it was to depressurize in midflight by say a window or door blowing out. How do you make it hard for this to happen? Well, you make the door open to the INSIDE, so that when locked and the airplane is under pressure, the pressure will press the door INTO the frame, making it impossible to blow out. This is why airline doors open INTO the aircraft and NOT out.
Basic stuff right? Only a company with no care for safety would change it.
Well boeing did it, so they could shove more cargo in it.
But surely then they would build the door really really well and have it tested really really well?
no... they did not and a LOT of people died when the door inenvitably did blow out and brought down the airplane.
Boeing has ALWAYS taken shortcuts and never given a shit about the risk and the FAA has always let them get away with it. Read up on the cargo door, it took a second incident for Boeing to be told to fix it BUT it was allowed to keep the outside opening door despite it being an obvious weak area.
You have to remember that in airliners, the interests are so gigantic that there is gigantic pressure on the engineers to find shortcuts and for those who are charged to oversee safety to look away so that their nations industry isn't hampered.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One of the more troubling things, in my opinion.. related to this were the actions of USA Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood..
Only hours before the FAA issued its order [to ground the 787], Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood reiterated to reporters that he considers the plane safe and wouldnâ(TM)t hesitate to fly one. LaHood and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta unequivocally declared the plane safe at a news conference last week even while they ordered a safety review of the aircraft.
So, in this guys opinion.. knowing what we all know.. he tells everyone is safe and he wouldnt hesitate to fly one?!
On Jan. 7, it took firefighters 40 minutes to put out a blaze centered in an auxiliary power unit of a Japan Airlines 787 ..that doesnt sound like a perfectly save thing to me!
I have to wonder why he sees the need to save face. I know Boeing plays a big part in our economy and that the govt needs to keep them appearing as a great company.....but shouldnt his job to be anything but misdirecting attention from the possible dangers here?!
Why isnt he running the feet of boeing and the FAA over the coals instead of acting like the
local cop saying NOTHING TO SEE HERE?!
(source: http://business.time.com/2013/01/17/lithium-batteries-central-to-boeings-787-woes/ )
When they got into trouble, they could eject the warp core.
Have gnu, will travel.
> Does this aircraft not have an APU?
Does it matter? If it has an APU, it would STILL need battery backup. Modern jets can't fly without electricity to power their computers. If you make the jet's ability to fly dependent upon a functioning APU, someday a failed APU will cause a crash. And even if it has redundant APUs, batteries are so cheap relative to the cost of a crash due to total power loss, Boeing would have had to be completely INSANE to make a plane without battery backup power.
This plane may be perfectly fine and just having teething problems as Boeing says, but it's made me wary and perhaps even angry since before it launched because the 787 was winning awards and accolades for being revolutionary and new and blah blah blah well before it had taken even a taxi test.
My feeling it, let the model prove itself first and then worry about awards. The 747 has proven itself. The 737. Even the 757 and 767 although nobody much cares about those two dullards. But let the 787 EARN its place and prove it is the real deal and then paste on the praise.
They didn't do that. They went 150% hype and probably bragged a lot when they should have been humble and wow what a surprise everybody notices when the hype-machine has problems that might otherwise go without much notice.
In other words, they hyped the hell out of it and golly if they didn't get hype for the errors and issues too. Sometimes it's better to stay out of the spotlight, but that tends to be easier to do when the whole company isn't riding on ONE model. Geez, Boeing.
To be fair, the same hype crap happens at the Detroit car show where they award "Car of the year" to a new model that hasn't actually gone on sale yet, hasn't proved it's something people want to buy or is reliable or even notable in any actual real-world way. I think the Volt got the award one such year. And wow was THAT a hot seller! Just flying off the shelves! Or not. It may make for nice headlines but it means jack shit when the vehicle has never sold copy-one to anybody.
Sig for hire.
The batteries are used primarily to start the APUs. They are required because unlike just about any other commercial aircraft the APUs are actually needed in flight. This is how they can come up with the engine efficiency claims as they don't use bleed air from them for power, they always use the APUs. So in the event of an in flight restart having to happen you need the batteries.
Yet? The aircraft are grounded, and they will be until they're certain the problem won't reappear.
The FAA quite clearly wanted this plane in the air, and it's only been the extremely obvious nature of the problems that has grounded the plane.
And why, exactly, is the plane "fundamentally flawed"? The experimental nature of the aircraft
It's not an experiment any more.
mainly involves the composite nature of the materials and the new avionics- nothing related to why these planes were grounded. I've heard some talk of delamination of the composites, but if that were a serious issue, then the aircraft would have been grounded for that reason instead of battery fires.
Those issues have probably yet to surface. They are clearly trying to curt corners to not only save cost but save weight. I suspect the carbon composite build of the plane did not give them the fuel savings that would make the plane anywhere near compelling.
And it seems they did it again. Everyone knows these batteries are risky but to save a bit of weight, Boeing went for them regardless AND just a tiny bit into production, it becomes clear they did NOT engineer it correctly. Or test it for that matter. This ain't software "engineering" in real world engineering you either are sure, or you don't do it. It is the same logic that blew up the shuttle managers overriding engineers.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.