Notably absent from the FAA and Boeing statements is the F-Word, that being fire.
Despite the fact that the battery gone wild on the Japan Airlines Dreamliner at Boston's Logan Airport did catch fire, there will be no change in the regulator's position that fire on an airplane is a no-no. And that means even if contained in a big strong box, fire will be a no-go on the 787.
Despite the fact that the battery gone wild on the Japan Airlines Dreamliner at Boston's Logan Airport did catch fire, there will be no change in the regulator's position that fire on an airplane is a no-no. And that means even if contained in a big strong box, fire will be a no-go on the 787.
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| The battery from the JAL battery fire in Boston. |
Renewing a commitment to separate fire from flight sounds mighty good, but don't get too charged up about it. There are folks who insist, it ain't possible.
"There is zero probability of building a lithium ion battery and promising there won't ever be any chance of fire," said Lewis Larsen, a physicist and the chief executive of Lattice Energy in Chicago. "You cannot honestly say that." Larsen has been studying how microscopically small particles can cause catastrophic failures in lithium ion batteries and he hasn't been quiet about what he has learned. In a paper he posted online in 2010, Larsen wrote,
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| Exam of JAL battery from NTSB investigation |
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| An NTSB investigator examines material from the JAL 787 |
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| The battery from ANA's Dreamliner |
The Dreamliner packs 16 lithium ion battery cells on each plane. I'm no mathematician but with either of the estimated field failure rates cited above, there's no way the Dreamliner can meet the certification standards restricting smoke events to one in every 100 million hours if Larsen and Barnett's numbers are correct. Nor, these scientists say, can a lithium ion battery user ever entirely rule out fire from field failures. Boeing determined that fire in the battery would be a one in a billion catastrophic event in applying for certification for the 787.
In making the announcement, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood repeated for the umpteenth time the promise of federal safety officials, "We won't allow the plane to return to service unless we're satisfied that the new design ensures the safety of the aircraft and its passengers." Secretary LaHood doth not protest too much. He's clearly trying to live down his statement on January 11th that the Dreamliner is safe to fly.
No one doubts that the Dreamliner has lived up to its billing as a revolutionary airplane. But by hitching their airplane of tomorrow to a complicated and volatile technology Boeing's battery design may be the revolution's first casualty.