Thanks for so many responses so quickly!
I am very much in the same quandary as Hartington above. I
know air travel is very safe, andI
know that it is more down to the operator than the aircraft, and under almost every other situation I would be telling anyone stating that they would not fly on <insert aircraft name> not to be silly. I also wonder if there is some anti-Boeing press going on in Europe for whatever reason.
However, there seem to be a lot of unknowns: what caused the battery problems? Why did an airframe on the ground suddenly have a fire that burned through the skin? The turn-back of the Thomson flight may well have been "just one of those things", but what was it? Reading some of the pilot forums here, there is one experienced chap (amicus) who is convinced that the composite skin will catch fire at (relatively) low temperatures, producing toxic fumes very quickly, and tending to burn more in the air-stream (as far as I can make out, a bit like blowing on a cigarette). This, to me puts the risk into a different category than engine-failure - which is usually survivable due to having backups.
I'm more than a bit concerned that the problems have too many unknowns that could lead to a Comet scenario, of problems that people think they have a handle on, but there is something so new that they don't know how to check for it (and who, these days, would do the equivalent of the water-tank test?).
On balance, I'd prefer to avoid a 787, at least for a while. However, the thing that would make me most reluctant to fly on one is that the cabin-crew have control of the window-dimmers. I don't want to fly on a plane that I can't look out of the window occasionally (minor claustrophobia issues
)