There has been some development in the investigation(s) going on to determine the nature of the battery problem on the 787.  Primarily, it is now known that the battery in the Boston 787 incident as the source of the fire in that there is a battery cell that has been identified as the source.

The battery manufacturer has been investigated closely and no quality assurance problems have been identified in their facilities.

Boeing has asked for and received permission for test flights and has done at least one successfully.  No surprise there.

Let’s not forget that this airliner has been flying around in tests and for airlines for over 3 years now.   While there is no doubt that a problem could have persisted through testing and introduction into service, if it were an easy problem to reproduce, it would have been a problem that came to light sooner than this.

The alarming part of the problem isn’t the whether the battery is of good design or even if the charging and control systems are the source of the problem.  It’s that when those batteries go, they really go.

I expect that Boeing has made changes to controls and/or how the battery is mounted and maintained and is performing test flights with instrumentation to get the FAA to approve an interim fix.  Then there will be an expectation that the battery will either be redesigned or replaced with safer technology.  Both could take as much as a year to do.

Would the FAA approve an interim fix?  I absolutely think so.  Sadly, that decision may be driven more by economics than science which means that we’ll have some doubt about the interim fix as its deployed.

I am beginning to think that Boeing is shoving its head deeper and deeper into a hole over this problem and mostly because Boeing CEO Jim McNerney seems bent on just issuing assurance after assurance in the belief that Boeing credibility is the paramount thing to rely upon here.

Despite Boeing’s assurances that they take this seriously and are heavily engaged in a fix, I can’t escape the feeling that they’re trying hard to explain this away as opposed to performing a full mea culpa and dig in with an honest root cause analysis that serves everyone’s concerns at this point.

In fact, I believe doing the latter will cost far less over the long run than the antics going on presently.

Filed under: Aircraft Development by ajax