787 Battery Containment Plan Firms Up
As Boeing’s 787 enters the second month of its fleet-wide grounding, the U.S. airframer is poring over data collected on a series of flight and ground tests and says it is making “good progress” toward a solution.
The fix, at least in the short term,
continues to be focused on improving containment of the aircraft’s two existing lithium-ion batteries and adding more temperature monitors to provide earlier warning of abnormal battery performance via the engine indicating and crew alerting system.
This is a very scary scenario when an aircraft manufacturer decides that the best fix (at least in the short term) is to improve the ability to contain Lithium ion battery fires and explosions that are probable (a certainty?) with statistically significant number of flight cycles over the next year or so.
The concept of trying to cope with flying a passenger aircraft with a ticking time bombs in both battery bays by adding additional layers of fire protection as opposed to the obvious solution of removing said time bomb is ludicrous to the extreme.
This route smacks very much of commercial interference and corruption of due process over what should be a very straight forward engineering solution.
At least Airbus has now demonstrated the strength of their conviction by announcing the decision that they will take the Lithium ion battery out of their A350 and replace it with Ni Cads until Lithium ion technology catches up with the required public transport mandated reliability requirements.
Wake up Boeing! Listen to your engineers. Without you, Airbus will inherit a monopoly and monopolies are bad for aviation.