Another 787 has caught fire, at Heathrow. Here is some BBC video. Fortunately, no one aboard, and it was on the ground. As noted, they are announcing there that another Dreamliner has just returned to Manchester, though its unclear if the incidents are related.
22 thoughts on “Bad News For Boeing”
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That fire seems close to the position of the APU battery:
http://blog.cafefoundation.org/?p=7482
However AFAIK there is no official report yet.
Oop. Yep. Right above the APU battery.
From other articles I just saw, the fire wasn’t in the area of the batteries and the damage is near the galley. It’s an Ethiopian Airways jet, so perhaps the stewardesses didn’t properly pour water on their in-flight cooking fire to make sure it was completely out.
Bazinga!
So far, the Manchester abort is related to a technical issue of some sort (link), so it wasn’t an unruly passenger or anything.
Yeah. I was surprised to know Ethiopian Airlines had 787s. Supposedly 4 in service. They seem to have a fairly modern aircraft fleet.
well if the fire started in the APU battery, it’s going to be another
whack to the stock
That discoloration on the top of the fuselage is cause for concern. I wonder how Boeing will be able to repair possible composite delamination. That appears to be in a high stress area so proper inspection and repair is critical.
Hilarious comment on Twitter:
You may already know of prime, complex and surreal numbers, but what about inflammable numbers? The best known of these is 787.
KTVU read the names of the four pilots on Asiana flight 214.
the names
Unfortunately the anchor will go down in the annals of history for actually reading those names on the air. Somewhere Bart Simpson is laughing his a** off. I laughed so hard that all my housemate’s dogs started barking.
OMG, I was in tears by the time they got to ‘Wi Tu Lo’. I mean what kinda air head person do you have to be to read that list and not realize it was a joke. Bang Ding Ow…..really? LoL
Yeah, just one of those could have been a crazy coincidence, like the hilariously named Taepodong missile. But all four?
You have to be the kind of person who works at San Francisco’s most trusted liberal/progressive TV news outlet, I suppose. If you spout utter nonsense for decades, normal commonsense rational mental filters atrophy and die, and then one day you’re reading “Captain Sum Ting Wong” and “Ho Lee Fuk” on the air with a straight face because you don’t even suspect anything, since the names were allegedly confirmed by someone at the NTSB, which is part of the Obama Administration.
Elon had to deal with the same issue and came up with a solution. Too bad Boeing is unwilling to listen.
I can see the Boeing senior managers now, doing the Nasa Challenger dance… “Well, we haven’t had any crash, everything must be ok!”
Pity I don’t have any money with which to buy Airbus stock…
Criticism of Ethiopian Airlines be raciss.
Criticism of raciss B Lewis.
Here are a couple links to short Aviation Week stories on that 787.
Ethiopian 787 In Heathrow Fire Incident
An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 was severely damaged by fire today at London Heathrow Airport, although the fire does not appear to be connected with the lithium-ion battery problems which grounded all 787s earlier this year.
The fire, understood to have broken out shortly before 5 p.m., occurred while the aircraft was parked on a remote stand in the western part of the airport prior to the scheduled 9 p.m. departure of the airline’s flight ET701 to Addis Ababa Bole International Airport.
The aircraft had been parked at the airport for 8 hr. prior to the fire.
Images of the incident indicate that the blaze occurred in the aft fuselage, close to the rear galley and crew rest area near doors L3 and R3. Evidence of charring is visible in the crown section at the base of the fin close to the structural junction of the aft fuselage Section 47 with the mid-fuselage section.
It is not yet known where the fire originated, or the extent of the structural damage inside the fuselage. There were no passengers on board and Heathrow officials have said there are no reported injuries.
787 Fire At Heathrow
Images of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 which was damaged by fire at London’s Heathrow airport on July 12, show that the blaze was probably not connected with the lithium-ion battery problems which grounded the aircraft earlier this year.
That’s the good news for Boeing and other 787 operators. The bad news for Ethiopian in this case is that the aircraft involved, ET-AOP (L/N44), which was the first 787 to restart operations in mid-April following the fleet-wide grounding, could be down for a very long time. Although it is too early to tell from these images if the airframe could be considered a write-off, the damage looks to represent – at the very least – a huge AOG challenge.
The fire, understood to have broken out shortly before 5pm, occurred while the aircraft was parked on a remote stand in the western part of the airport prior to the scheduled 9 pm departure of the airline’s ET701 service to Addis Ababa. Images of the incident indicate the blaze occurred in the aft fuselage close to the rear galley and crew rest area by doors L3 and R3. Evidence of charring is visible in the crown section at the base of the fin close to the structural junction of the aft fuselage Section 47 with the mid-fuselage section.
I’d hate for the plane to be written off because of the difficulty in making the necessary repairs but it might happen. The cause is still unknown but one possibility is something left smoldering in the crew rest area or galley, such as a cigarette from a cleaning crew.
Unless they change the configuration of the batteries, this problem stays with them.
One day it will be a case study in corporate psychology.
Support for my contentions.
Investigators rule out APU batteries
They still don’t know the cause but the fire didn’t start anywhere near the batteries.
They say it didn’t start near the batteries but don’t say where it started. I’d still bet on the batteries.
The investigation is focusing on the batteries in the emergency locator beacon system.
NY Times link.
It would be ironic if the emergency locator beacon system was useful for rapidly locating aircraft that crashed – except for the ones that crashed because of a fire started by the emergency locator beacon system.
They mention that the 6.6 pound units have logged over 50 million flight hours in about 6,000 other airliners without incident, and it uses a lithium-manganese non-rechargeable battery, like we use in smoke detectors.
So my suspicion is that in other installations the unit is attached to aluminum, which is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, whereas the Dreamliner’s skin provides neither. The unit shouldn’t have been putting out any heat in the first place or it would run the battery down, so perhaps there’s a grounding problem that hasn’t shown up until now.