Concours77
I sure hope you're not a pilot (or in the industry) - your lack of knowledge of the regulations is shocking if you are...
There are regulatory requirements for reporting "incidents" - with rather strict guidelines as to what constitutes an incident (commonly known as 21.3 reports) - and a battery meltdown certainly qualifies. The FAA sees every 21.3 reports submitted. Failure to report (or to cover up) a reportable event is a major violation - consequences can vary from multi-million dollar fines to having your airworthiness certificate pulled.

Lots of different ways "incidents" get reported. Not all are in the aircraft logs as the details may only become known afterwards.

In my experience the most thorough reporting both in quantity and validated facts are the reports from operator's maintenance operations directly to the manufacturer. Of course what tdracer said is true but there is a lot of leeway in what gets reported to the local FAA as "Service Difficulties and the level of valid facts makes it almost useless unless it was major enough to attract the attention of the Certificate office.

The fuse in all this is the FAA oversight of the airworthiness certificate holder (aircraft and engine manufactures etc.) data collection and actions under Continued Airworthiness. That data is far more useful in being proactive and is the support for the Service Bulletins that get passed around everyday. We simply look to the FAA to mandate compliance action as needed

lomapaseo

"Service Difficulties and the level of valid facts makes it almost useless unless it was major enough to attract the attention of the Certificate office."

That is my point. In the face of blatant and not understood failure of the emergency battery system, we were bombarded with PR. Boeing reacted poorly. This system failure is in a class with whirl mode, metallurgic inadequacies, (deHavilland, Boeing's pencil whipped skin inspections, etc.) and more in the sense this time of foot dragging, petulant defense, and emergency steps to save the design and the marketing, not the aircraft.....

Some pilot's seem to be whistling in the cemetery... The repair itself is an admission of continuing failure, however "well controlled"....