Seems to say 50 planes, ~290 seats per craft, 14,500 passenger seats @ ~700GBP average, = 10MGBP per roster per day. In other words a reasonably large compensation claim appearing on the Boeing P+L.

about twenty years ago I was involved in Emergency Planning for a South West County Council. We had a callout to a fire on the M5 near Taunton.

A truck carrying scrap material from RNAS and Westlands (Yeovil) caught fire and burned very fiercely. A slew of fire appliances had some difficulty extinguishing the blaze, and the water and foam provided a test of contamination procedures.

The 'inquest' revealed that a crate of lithium batteries from helicopters had been accidentally soaked with rain, and the resultant short-circuit had created a fire, which then affected other battery crates, and magnesium aircraft parts.

It was a visually spectacular fire

Procedures for isolating scrap lithium batteries from Westlands were put into place as a result.

Lithium battery fires are nothing new.

She may present terrible surprises to us
 

sarabande:

So, they may surprise us during her life and after they die. :}

Interesting statements within airlines industry to FAA´s decission of grounding 787: At Boeing, pushback on 787 grounding | Business & Technology | The Seattle Times

shonandai posted an incorrect link to the picture of the affected battery. The correct link is Yomiuri On-Line �i“Ç”„�V•·�j

Surely a total loss of the APU battery even if the fire is contained within the battery box is a no go item. A large number of the emergency proceedures require the APU to start, The Hudson River incident for example would not have been successful without a working APU. I guess the main battery is slightly more important, to supply the Hot battery bus for example. but as I understand both batteries are interchangable, then the cause & fixing of this problem must be completed before the a/c can fly again

Taunusflyer. Thank you for the link, an interesting take on the grounding from Seattle.

To borrow a quote from TURIN, one I use often, "It is what it is...."

One of the easiest things to do, even easier than noodling out a battery problem, it seems to me, is to manage the way one's corporation is perceived by the client. And the Public...

Yelping aloud to reporters how unfair and unwise it is to act to protect the safety of the travelling public, even if true, is unprofessional, and ultimately, expensive.

Where does the Board find these people? Outsourced?

First I've heard of shooting yourself in the second foot.

Wheelchair at gate A 22, please.

APU no-go?
 

Walnut, what are you talking about?
Don't know about the 787 but on an ETOPS A330 the APU is NOT a no-go.
Do you fly the A320? How do you know then?

Apologies if this has already been referred to.

This recent FLIGHT article makes for interesting reading.

787 into uncharted territory. 17 January 2013

excess voltage ruled out
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/bu...l?ref=business

manufacturing flaw then?

flightglobal

To my knowledge, they are Lithium Cobalt type....

A good confidence test
 

A Seattle Times article linked to above indicates how unhappy Boeing is about the FAA decision. This shows exactly how divorced the business droids have become from reality:

There was a very real even though low-probability risk of the battery issues resulting in a serious incident; in fact one fire-fighter has already been injured, which is more than enough harm for a "safe" design.

The FAA with the grounding did them a huge service, reducing to zero the risk of a serious incident, giving them time to deploy a fix, and reassuring passengers that the fix will be a *real* fix.

If Boeing execs want to convincingly demonstrate confidence in their plane, I suggest they schedule a test flight to Japan and back for their wives and children.

Edmund

No clear picture
 

Well, the batteries may not be off the hook as much as the Japanese safety investigators, as quoted here, believe :
Japan: Over-charging preceded ANA 787 battery malfunction
Now the NTSB says there was no overvoltage to the batteries:
NTSB rules out excess battery voltage in Boston 787 incident | Reuters

So there is as yet no obvious simple cause for the failures and hence no quick end to the grounding. This is not good for either Boeing or its customers, because it also suggests that better monitoring of the batteries may not help.
An emergency replacement of the battery seems inevitable. Could Boeing just switch to the certified unit from the 777 and offset the performance shortfalls with process changes? Restarting the APU does not seem to be too demanding a task.

Seen this?
 

From REUTERS...

"On Tuesday, the U.S. investigating group will convene in Arizona to test and examine the battery charger and download non-volatile memory from the APU controller, the NTSB added."

That puts the NTSB at securaplane, the charging vendor. Could they not find a neutral venue? The vendor had a building burn to the ground when one of the test batteries ignited, in 2006?

ABCNEWS is reporting that the causes for JAL accident, and ANA incident were different.

Surely, this will never happen in Aviation Industry....

I sense there are two issues here

the one that everybody seems to be talking about here is the failure of a single non-critical system in a spectacular way (see photos in previous posts)

Identifying and fixing the root cause only minimizes the risk to an unknown level since any battery is prone to failure for a variety of causes at any time.

The larger issue is the availability of redundancy and shielding should the battery fail in a critical flight regime.

I'm still not clear what the critical safety issue is that caused the grounding of this fleet. If we want to nit pick at Boeings comments then we need to understand this part of the equation.

For starters I am looking for expert comments on how necessary such a battery is to safe flight operation?

Secondly was this fire contained in a manner presumed in the original certification documents ?

It's one thing to have a precautionary landing and quite another to have a forced landing as this can be addressed by updating SOPs (still leaving the pilot to decide)

Bad news
 

Hi,

Now Boeing is going to have just one option. Retrofit to Ni Cd´s. Implications:

1) Time
2) A/C specs
3) Cost, etc.

PR will be able to do a good job and industry continue to improve safety.

And what about the use of her in A380? :}