ANA is likely the fleet leader. 1st delivery in Sept 2011. They are not averaging 2 flts per day, so less than 1000 cycles which is probably more critical than hrs. It might be interesting to know how they are operating with respect to the batteries, e.g. are they using the batteries or grnd pwr to start the apu. I'm sure Boeing tested the system in some very harsh conditions. However these could have been limited number of cycles versus daily airline operations.
I don't have exact numbers but the ANA 787 was delivered 1 year and 2 days prior to the event. The JAL 787 was less than a month old when its battery caught fire.
787 fleet commercial flight statistics as of Jan 2013 before the grounding... 50 airplanes in service with a combined 18,000 flight cycles and more than 50,000 flight hours. (does not includes any previous flight test cycles/hours) They were flying about 150 flights a day on average across the fleet
Boeing has been trading at about $75/share for the past 6 months. Avg volume is 7 million shares per day. Basically the news has had no effect on BA stock price.
So at this point, we have a couple bad battery packs (out of 100? 2 per plane times 50). In over 50K hours? But fires are VERY serious. Even more so with an 'all electric' plane (no bleed air). I'm guessing that a year from now, this will be a footnote... remembered but not a factor in the public's mind. Boeing is still building 787's...
The JTSB is drawing blanks in there investigation of the battery failures Japanese Safety Board Draws Blank In 787 Battery Probe And the maker of Tesla cars is bashing the design of the 787 battery's Elon Musk: Boeing 787 battery fundamentally unsafe
US regulator asks Boeing for full battery history | General Headlines | Comcast US regulator asks Boeing for full battery history TOKYO U.S. regulators said Wednesday they asked Boeing Co. to provide a full operating history of lithium-ion batteries used in its grounded 787 Dreamliners after Japan's All Nippon Airways revealed it had repeatedly replaced the batteries even before overheating problems surfaced. National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson said the agency made the request after recently becoming aware of battery problems at ANA that occurred before a Jan. 7 battery fire in a 787 parked at Boston's Logan International Airport. Boeing has already collected some of the information, he said. ANA said it had replaced batteries on its 787 aircraft some 10 times because they failed to charge properly or showed other problems, and informed Boeing about the swaps. Japan Airlines also said it had replaced 787 batteries. It described the number involved as a few but couldn't immediately give further details. All 50 of the Boeing 787s in use around the world remain grounded after an ANA flight on Jan. 16 made an emergency landing in Japan when its main battery overheated. Lithium-ion batteries are prone to overheating and require additional safeguards to prevent fires. However, ANA spokeswoman Megumi Tezuka said the airline was not required to report the battery replacements to Japan's Transport Ministry because they did not interfere with flights and did not raise safety concerns. Having to replace batteries on aircraft is not uncommon and was not considered out of the ordinary, she said. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, said in Washington that the agency was checking whether the previous battery incidents had been reported by Boeing. With 17 of the jets, ANA was Boeing's launch customer for the technologically advanced airliner. The airline has had to cancel hundreds of flights, affecting tens of thousands of people, but has sought to minimize disruptions by switching to other aircraft as much as possible. The battery problems experienced by ANA before the emergency landing were first reported by The New York Times. Japanese and U.S. investigators looking into the Boeing 787's battery problems shifted their attention this week from the battery-maker, GS Yuasa of Kyoto, Japan, to the manufacturer of a monitoring system. That company, Kanto Aircraft Instrument Co. makes a system that monitors voltage, charging and temperature of the lithium-ion batteries. On Tuesday, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it was conducting a chemical analysis of internal short circuiting and thermal damage of the battery that caught fire in Boston. The probe is also analyzing data from flight data recorders on the aircraft, the NTSB said in a statement on its website. ___
IMO should be replaced with many small cells like Musk said ... until that happens the planes should be grounded. Don't care if they think they have solved the charging issue, they are not safe it appears. Heads should roll ... Pete
It will be quite interesting to see how many other airlines have been replacing 787 batteries at the same rate as indicated in the story above. Ten times in a year sounds high. If other operators of 787s are not replacing them as frequently, we have reason to believe there is much more to the story. Complex systems can have complex answers.
To be more specific, Absorbed Glass Mat is the official term for this type of battery. "An OPTIMA battery is neither a gel battery nor regular flooded battery. OPTIMA is a SPIRALCELLTECHNOLOGY AGM battery." Optimas are durable, can withstand high levels of vibration and can be mounted in any position. I will never use flooded-cell battery my TR after seeing what one did to the nose of my 308 years ago when it over-charged and overflowed. They are HEAVY but may be a viable option to the Li batteries.
Someone in the design department has some explaining to do. (But WHOSE design?) I'm am blown away by the total miss on this engineering. Public domain source: http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2020241385_787deadbatteriesxml.html At least 100 batteries failed on 787 fleet By Dominic Gates Seattle Times aerospace reporter Boeing had numerous reliability issues with the main batteries on its 787 Dreamliner long before the two battery incidents this month grounded the entire fleet. More than 100 of the lithium-ion batteries have failed and had to be returned to the Japanese manufacturer, according to a person inside the 787 program with direct knowledge. “We have had at least 100, possibly approaching 150, bad batteries so far,” the person said. “It’s common.” The frequency of battery failures reflects issues with the design of the electrical system around the battery, said the person on the 787 program. Most of the batteries were returned because they had run down so far that a low-voltage cutout was activated. At that stage, the batteries, which cost about $16,000 each, are essentially dead and cannot be recharged. The failures likely occurred on planes flown by Boeing and on those delivered to its customers. For airline operators, such failures could be costly in terms of airplane downtime and inconvenience. These problems seem separate from the two more significant incidents, when a battery caught fire on the ground in Boston and another smoldered in midair in Japan, forcing an emergency landing. But the electrical system that monitors and controls the batteries is under scrutiny by the National Transportation Safety Board and other safety investigators as they probe the cause of the recent incidents. Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter declined to confirm the number of battery problems encountered on the 787 program. However, she acknowledged that there has been a series of problems and listed “the top three reasons for Boeing returning batteries” as batteries running down, being improperly disconnected, or exceeding their expiration date. A battery that’s left on with no other power source, Gunter said, “will deep discharge (and) cannot be recharged or reused.” And one that’s improperly disconnected, she added, “trips one of the protection features and renders the battery unusable.” On Tuesday evening, The New York Times reported that officials of All Nippon Airways (ANA), the 787’s biggest operator, said in an interview that the airline had replaced 10 of the batteries in the months before the two battery incidents that grounded the jets this month. Between May and December last year, The New York Times reported, five of the 10 replaced ANA batteries were unexpectedly low in charge, three failed to start normally, one showed an error reading, and another “failed.” The person on the 787 program with knowledge of the problems said that the electrical-system design makes it commonplace for airline mechanics to inadvertently run the lithium-ion batteries down too low. Because lithium-ion batteries can be dangerously volatile if undercharged, as well as when overcharged, an automatic cutoff is built into the 787 batteries so that if the charge falls below 15 percent of full, the battery locks. “It latches — locked out — and we cannot override that,” the person said. In that case, it can only be sent back to the manufacturer, GS Yuasa of Japan. The design of the 787’s electrical system includes a battery switch in the cockpit. But even when that main switch is off, the battery comes on when certain ground tasks are performed. Just as a car’s dome light will come on even when the ignition is off, drawing power from the battery, so too on an airplane certain maintenance tasks will bring the battery to life. For example, if an airline mechanic puts jet fuel in the wing gas tank when the airplane is otherwise dark, as soon as the fuel door opens the battery will begin to provide power for the gauges that measure the fuel level. If that door latch is not properly closed or if the mechanic encounters a problem or leaves something else open too long, the 787 battery can drain down below the critical 15 percent level in an hour, the person said. The 787 batteries are unique and the system supplier, Thales of France, insists that the original manufacturer — its subcontractor GS Yuasa — must be the sole supplier. So all the dead 787 batteries have been shipped back to Japan and replacements have had to be sent from there. ******************************************* I am speechless.............
Yes as I said earlier this area needs a redesign, and 787 version 1 needs to come out and the originals sent back to Boeing to be converted. Pete
Much of the Engineering was outsourced on this A/P hence my rhetorical question. Slap some Optima Blue Top marine batteries in there, problem solved except for the extra weight and lack of room required for an alternate battery type. The voltage would need to be stepped up too. That itself would be the hardest part.
I am too old and too far out of the loop now to understand the mentality of big business and the abdication of embracing the job at hand. To dispense and to distribute the responsibility of properly producing that which has been placed in your trust is foreign to me. I spent more than 1/2 of my life working for Boeing and I was inculcated with the creed of producing the absolute best that I could because we always did it better than anyone else. Trite? I suppose, but it was the way it was. And the crux of the whole thing was that we did EVERYTHING. A minor amount was subcontracted but it was ALWAYS thoroughly qualified and verified. I saw parts sent back to the supplier because it did not meet our inspection standards. I saw suppliers dismissed that didn't meet the standards. I believe that the most important element was that we kept the prime design and production of most of the crucial items in house. Some radical changes occurred after Boeing ingested Douglas and I firmly believe that Douglas had some poisonous elements that came with it. Some but not all.
That is the way it should be. Just because you subcontract something does not mean it should not meet your own standards, or you can deflect the blame. This issue is still a Boeing one and Boeing needs to get it solved. Pete
Yes it is and they need to start acting like real airplane builders like they used to be instead of "assemblers of major components" like they are now.
Sorry, don't have time, I have a meeting to attend. Such is the state of affairs at Boeing. Given the number of meetings that are held, and the number of attendees at each one, it is no wonder that Boeing needs to offload engineering. IMO this started during the 777 era with the introduction of all the acronyms, e.g. 5S, DBT, IPT, etc. Everyone wanted to have a say in the process, and management by committee became the norm. Very few leaders left as the old guard was retired and managing the process became more important than the process. Maybe Boeings recent realignment to separate engineering from production will have a positive influence.
Welcome to American business in the 21st century Bob. Best and brightest my ass. Its a good thing your generation got us to the Moon. These idiots wouldn't have a chance.
