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All of the operational Boeing 787 Dreamliners in the world (50) are now sitting on runways being prodded by men with clipboards, after a series of safety niggles caused worries for air authorities and triggered a global grounding.
The high-tech airliner has a surprisingly low-tech Achilles’ heel — its battery. The current wave of safety concerns centre around the 787′s lithium-ion power cells, which have triggered two serious fire concerns in the last couple of weeks, one leading to an emergency landing and evacuation in Japan.
As anyone who’s disinterestedly scrolled through a tech site in the last few years will know, modern li-ion batteries have been seen to explode and catch fire on the odd occasion. When that happens to a phone it’s a bit of a pain and you get on the local news and you might have to go back to using an old Nokia for a week. No biggie.
Were it to happen in the belly of an aeroplane at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic, it’d cause slightly larger problems. [BBC]
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I’m not sure how prodding it with a clipboard is going to help things, but given everything else they’ve had go wrong with this model, it can’t hardly make things worse!
Reminds me of how they solved the whole wings falling off thing by drilling a series of holes at the point of rupture. Thus proving the theory that nothing ever tears along the dotted line.
Do you reckon anyone’s told them turning off Location Services and push email helps with the whole battery-usage thing?
They probably forgot to Hoover the dust out of the cooling fins.
It’s the pilots charging their iPads during flight!
Some airlines, like Continental Airlines, specifically state that battery charging is not allowed and ask you to remove your rechargeable battery from your laptop on the plane… so why would they use the same rechargeable technology in the planes batteries!?
Hazarding a guess, I’d suggest that it’s because the power supply on an aircraft is anything but stable. While a you may lose your laptop transformer and even blow some of the electronics within the laptop itself, removing the battery means that if there is a spike in power, you’re not suddenly going to have a charged battery with issues.
It could also be related to the fact that most laptops don’t actually draw that much current, however if you’re trying to charge the battery as well, then it may draw more power than the aircraft circuit breakers will allow.
What I don’t get is why don’t they lose altitude and open a door? Surely the rush of air would put the fire out.
Wait no, how silly of me, it would just fuel the fire.
How frequent are fires caused by li-ion batteries? There are, I suppose, literally millions of the buggers out there. As you say, when one catches fire, you get on the local news. Which suggests that these things are not common. Maybe 1 in 10 million? And I think that that rate is probably higher than it would be were you to apply rigorous manufacturing standards to the things (it’s internal shorts, right?) So there seems no reason why a plane wouldn’t use these things: the risk of a problem is probably lower than 1 in 10 million.
Without knowing where the batteries on a 787 are located it’s difficult to say, but certainly if they’re in an unpressurised section of the airframe then they’re going to be regularly subjected to operational temperature ranges far in excess of a standard Li-ion battery, which could be causing further complications.
This smells of either a fault with the battery manufacturing process, or the design of the aircraft itself.
I think smoke was detected in a cockpit of one? Shortly followed by human crap….LOL
If you mis-charge a Li-ion or Li-poly battery then it will catch fire or explode, so there could be something wrong with the charging circuit.
It’s like keeping oil in a barrel made of spark plugs, if it suddenly catches fire then you should blame the barrel not the oil.