Quote:
In Boeing's view, neither incident met the company's internal definition for the condition called "thermal runaway". That is a situation in which there "is so much energy, so much heat and so much flame that it would put the airplane at risk", Sinnett says. "We know very clearly this was not the case in the Logan event and the Takamatsu event."
Full Wings
That assertion doesn't seem to be backed up by the NTSB initial report. If the firefighters had just stood back and done nothing, odds-on we'd be looking at pile of ashes in the outline of a 787 at BOS. It's very difficult to imagine there not being a serious conflagration with all that energy dumped into a confined space.
The "contained" burn damage occurred *despite* a fire crew arriving extremely promptly and using large amounts of extinguishant over the period of an hour or more. A luxury which is not available in the air, where the aeroplane was shortly beforehand.
This is commercial/political spin of the worst order and I wish Boeing would stop it and get on with fixing the problem(s). IMHO they should fire some of the management and hire some more engineers...
Agreed - and how will containing such an event in a metal box help?