The FAA will be conducting a “comprehensive review of the design and production of the Boeing 787,” according to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Concern over Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner has grown this week after a lithium ion battery caught fire on board one of the new airliners in Boston on Jan. 7, one of several issues that have arisen since the airplane entered service more than a year ago.
Both the FAA and Boeing emphasized that the airplane is safe to fly and that all of the recent incidents with the aircraft were typical of a new jet entering commercial service. Secretary LaHood says he has confidence both in the certification of the airplane and the airplane itself.
“Throughout the development of the Boeing 787, the FAA logged 200,000 hours on the certification of the aircraft to ensure it met our high level of safety,” Secretary LaHood said during today’s press conference. “I believe this plane is safe, and I would have absolutely no reservation of boarding one of these planes and taking a flight. These planes are safe.”
The 787 will continue to be flown by airlines during the review.
Indeed, there appeared to be plenty of support for the Dreamliner from both Secretary LaHood and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. Both repeated on multiple occasions their belief that the Boeing 787 is safe, raising the question of why a review is being conducted if the airplane underwent such a rigorous certification process and is considered safe to fly by both administrators.
“The purpose of the review is to validate the work that we have done and to look at the quality and other processes to ensure that effective oversight is being done,” FAA Administrator Huerta told reporters. He said the FAA wants to look at the entire design and production process and not simply focus on recent events. But Huerta did add there would be an emphasis on the 787′s electrical systems, which have caused the bulk of the issues affecting the new airliner.
At separate points during the press conference both Huerta and LaHood referenced this week’s incidents. “Our focus is on developing a complete picture of these incidents and focusing on whatever actions we need to take to resolve them,” Administrator Huerta said.
Monday’s fire in Boston happened after passengers had disembarked the airplane. The fire was traced to one of the lithium ion batteries used for the auxiliary power unit at the back of the airplane. Administrator Huerta dodged a question about the safety of using a lithium ion battery in the 787 after a reporter asked about past concerns over shipping the batteries in transport airplanes having been addressed by different aviation agencies. But in the past the agency mandated that lithium ion batteries be removed from a jet model made by Cessna and replaced with non-lithium ion batteries after a fire concern was raised by the manufacturer.
Boeing points out that Monday’s battery fire was contained to the electronics bay where the battery was located, adding that if a fire were to occur during a flight, the area is designed to contain the fire and protect critical systems. The fuel leak that occurred on Jan. 8 has been blamed on a valve that was accidentally left open, causing the fuel to flow into a surge tank and out a vent as it is designed to do.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes president and CEO Ray Conner emphasized these design features today when answering questions about the fire and other recent issues. “Once the incidents have happened, the airplane has performed exactly as designed,” he said. “The redundancies that we have put into this machine are phenomenal, and the airplane performed perfectly in that respect.”
He added that the company of course would prefer if the incidents did not happen at all, and the goal of the new review is “root cause, corrective action.”
There were four other electrical issues on 787s over the past year and three of the incidents have been traced to a problem with a single batch of circuit boards manufactured by a supplier in Mexico according to the Seattle Times. Another electrical fire during flight testing of the airplane was traced to “foreign object debris,” because somebody dropped something in an electrical bay that led to the fire.
Conner noted the 787 has flown more than 50,000 commercial hours since entering service in December 2011 and there are more than 150 Dreamliner flights every day around the world with well over a million passengers flown. He says the 787′s entry into service is “on par” with the company’s last all new airplane, the 777.
“We are not seeing anything that is exceptionally unusual in terms of what we’re going through” Conner said.
Aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group agrees, mostly. He says so far the issue affecting the 787 appear to be minor, no show stoppers. But he believes the 787 has experienced an abnormal number of issues, something that could be expected because of the large number of new technologies being used on the airplane.
“There are certainly a lot more unusual incidents than with the 777,” Aboulafia told Wired. “But on the other hand we’re not looking at anything like a repeat of the [McDonnell Douglas] DC-10 which is the only American jetliner to have its certification withdrawn for any period of time.”
After multiple crashes of the DC-10 in the 1970s, the FAA suspended the aircraft’s type certificate in 1979 for a month following the investigation of a crash in Chicago.
Aboulafia says the extra-close scrutiny of the 787 may be focusing more attention on the teething issues Boeing is experiencing. The comparison made by Boeing’s Ray Conner between the 787 and the 777 is accurate as far as the dispatch rate of both airplanes is concerned during the early part of their respective entries into commercial service. And the 777 entered service in 1995, long before the media saturation of the internet allowed close scrutiny of the general public via countless news outlets and blogs.
There have been no passenger or crew fatalities with the 777 and only two “hull loss” crashes, where the airplane is subsequently scrapped, since it was introduced.
The FAA said there was no timetable set for the current review of the 787 design and production and it will largely depend on the information that is generated by the review, “we are driven by data, and what the data shows us.” But Adminsistrator Huerta said it will occur, “as expeditiously as possible.”
