"Just when Boeing thought its Dreamliner problems were over, the company faced a fresh crisis Friday when an empty 787 caught fire on the runway at London’s Heathrow airport.
No injuries were reported, and the cause of the fire isn’t yet clear. But the incident puts Boeing’s marquee 787 Dreamliner fleet back in the headlines after it was grounded earlier this year because of a fire risk associated with the planes’ batteries."
There is of course a reasonable possibility that there was a problem with Ethiopian Airlines maintenance or a similar problem. But if it is problem with Boeing (whether or not it was a battery problem) then a number of potential customers are going to start thinking that Boeing cut corners on design, testing or manufacturing and the wise thing to do is to let someone else be the guinea pig.
I was going to suggest that Ethiopian Airlines probably outsources the maintenance, but per this webpage, not only do they do their own maintenance, but they offer it to others.
NBC News is reporting the fire may have originated in the crew resting area at the back of the plane above the passenger compartment, nowhere near any batteries.
I don’t think so. Cigarette smokers were hardly the only cause of fires on board airplanes. (Look at what remains of Asiana Flight 214 as an example.) So I’m sure that plane manufacturers still emphasize fire-resistant materials.
"The UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch said the initial investigation was likely to take several days. It said it had found “extensive heat damage in the upper portion of the rear fuselage, a complex part of the aircraft”. “However, it is clear that this heat damage is remote from the area in which the aircraft main and APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) batteries are located and at this stage there is no evidence of a direct causal relationship.”
I will fly on a 787 when the design has ten years of service under its livery. Too many new technologies in conjunction, coupled with the distributed manufacturing that helps mask problem areas, for me to believe there are no potentially lethal bugs left.
I actually had very little trouble with Vista, even as an early adopter. I didn’t try to run it on marginal hardware, I didn’t try to upgrade a running installation with it and I didn’t have any major software that wasn’t Vista-ready.
In any case, it wasn’t going to kill me with a literal bluescreen of death. When a 787’s fuselage delaminates at 32,000 feet because the Brits used one kind of glue and the French another, it’s a compatibility problem of a whole different order.
“Investigators are examining an emergency transmitter as a possible cause or contributor to the fire that damaged a Boeing Co. 787…The emergency transmitter is designed to be activated in the event of a crash to help find the aircraft. It is powered by a small, internal lithium-manganese battery, a type that doesn’t have the history of volatility of lithium-ion batteries.”
