Originally Posted by
KelvinD
CW427's point re adding fire protection material to to flaky kitchen appliance is spot on. However, it seems not to apply to Boeing. Batteries overheating/bursting into flames? No problem. Put them in a fire resistant box. Job jobbed! Never mind fixing the bursting into flames issue!
You can keep repeating that myth, but it doesn't make it true.
Boeing completely redesigned the battery and the charging system. However, due to the extent of the damage to the battery during the two battery fires, they were unable to
definitively establish what the root cause was. So using a belt and suspenders approach, they put the battery in the steel box.
Before the redesign, 40 787s experienced 2 battery fires in about a year.
There are now ~800 787s in service, averaging ~4000 hours/year utilization (that works out to over 3 million flight hours/year fleetwide). Since the redesign there has been one battery event - a single cell failed but thanks to the battery redesign the fault was contained to a single cell and didn't propagate to the other cells. The cell fault was traced to a manufacturing defect and corrective action was put in place.
BTW, I don't think most of us would want to live in a world where Ralph Nader and his people designed things...
He did something - back in the late 70's or early 80's IIRC - where they designed a "safe" car to show the auto industry how it should be done. They put in pretty much every safety system in existence at the time, but they completely forgot the most important part of safety - not getting in an accident. The thing was so bad to drive it was literally an accident looking for the place to happen.