2013 Boeing 787 Dreamliner grounding

In 2013, the second year of service for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, a widebody jet airliner, several aircraft suffered from electrical system problems stemming from its lithium-ion batteries. Incidents included an electrical fire aboard an All Nippon Airways 787 and a similar fire found by maintenance workers on a parked Japan Airlines 787 at Boston's Logan International Airport. The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a review into the design and manufacture of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, followed by a full grounding of the entire Boeing 787 fleet, the first such grounding since that of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 in 1979. The plane has had two major battery thermal runaway events in 52,000 flight hours, which was substantially less than the 10 million flight hours predicted by Boeing, neither of which were contained safely.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a report on December 1, 2014, and assigned blame to several groups:

GS Yuasa of Japan, for battery manufacturing methods that could introduce defects not caught by inspection
Boeing's engineers, who failed to consider and test for worst-case battery failures
The Federal Aviation Administration, that failed to recognize the potential hazard and did not require proper tests as part of its certification process

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.