Dreamliner Nightmares

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chakk said:
railiner said:
Swadian Hardcore said:
There's another reason to dislike new planes.
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Yeah! Bring back the DC-3!

:p
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Rode both the DC-3 and the Boeing B-23 (twin engine version of the B-17) back in the 1970's, although both of these planes were being used in air pollution research (low level flying, slow speed) instead of commercial transport.
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Back sometime in the 1980's, I took Amtrak's Cape Codder from NYP to Hyannis. I then flew on Provincetown - Boston Airlines N136PB, their world record-holding DC-3, with over 80,000 hours logged, over to Boston, then home on the NEC. A very memorable trip. :)
 
jis said:
FAA approved Boeing's plan to fix the batter problem on the 787 this Tuesday....

A Boeing plan to redesign the 787 Dreamliner's fire-plagued lithium-ion batteries won approval Tuesday from the Federal Aviation Administration, moving the cutting-edge planes a step closer to flying passengers again.

The plan includes changes to the internal battery components to minimize the possibility of short-circuiting, which can lead to overheating and cause a fire. Among the changes are better insulation of the battery's eight cells and the addition of a new containment and venting system, the FAA said in a statement.

The FAA statement didn't provide an estimate for when the grounded planes might return to service. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., who was briefed by the agency, said that if all goes well, the FAA could give final approval by mid- to late April for the 787 to resume flight.

Boeing would still have to retrofit the 50 planes already delivered to eight airlines in seven countries, Larsen said in an interview. That could mean the plane wouldn't return to the skies until late April or early May, he said.
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Read the whole article at http://news.yahoo.com/faa-approves-boeing-plan-fix-220605784.html
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Certainly good news. Let's hope the flight-testing goes well, and the Dreamliner's are back in service, soon.....
 
If all goes perfectly, which seldom happens, they are saying late April or early May for certification and then whatever it takes to retrofit 50 planes.

Boeing says it will use ZA005 and LN86 for FAA flight tests.
 
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The Davy Crockett said:
While aboard #92 yesterday I read in the print version of USA Today - here is a link to the article -
The other plane will conduct tests on improving the engine that the company says are unrelated to the battery issue.
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HUH? :huh: :eek: :huh:

IF this is correct, are there some concerns about the engines too? :huh:
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No. That is apparently about testing uprated engines for use in the yet to be announced 787-10 to meet Mr. Udvar Hazy's demands on range.

Since they need FAA's permission to fly any 787s at present, that other set of test flights was included as part of this program to use a single umbrella clearance to fly test planes.
 
The Davy Crockett said:
While aboard #92 yesterday I read in the print version of USA Today - here is a link to the article -
The other plane will conduct tests on improving the engine that the company says are unrelated to the battery issue.
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HUH? :huh: :eek: :huh:

IF this is correct, are there some concerns about the engines too? :huh:
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I'm not aware of any engine related safety concerns.

Performance concerns (fuel vs. thrust) are typical for new engine designs and bleedless is about as new as it gets for commercial aviation.

For me this was the key part of the article...

Ricardo Martinez-Cid, an aviation trial lawyer with the Miami firm Podhurst Orseck, called it heartening that Boeing developed a fix for the revolutionary plane. But he said the FAA relies heavily on manufacturers when certifying new aircraft, so he would like to see the data that justify returning the plane to the sky and convincing travelers that the plane is safe. "The question is how much care and attention were given to the problem and to correcting it, before getting back out to market," Martinez-Cid said. "We know what a huge effect on the bottom line this is for Boeing. There's always going to be a degree of skepticism inherent in any fix. They should really take some extra steps in making sure that they're doing it right."
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This annoys me to no end. Maybe we need to cut our greater than all other nations combined military spending spree and redirect some of that wasted money into independently certifying new aircraft instead of just pretending the manufacturer can somehow ignore their own conflicts of interest and hold themselves accountable. So many of America's problems today are self-created. Yet we can't seem to make any progress on actually resolving them.
 
The Davy Crockett said:
While aboard #92 yesterday I read in the print version of USA Today - here is a link to the article -
The other plane will conduct tests on improving the engine that the company says are unrelated to the battery issue.
Click to expand...
HUH? :huh: :eek: :huh:

IF this is correct, are there some concerns about the engines too? :huh:
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The tests are to evaluate tweeks to the engines to improve performance.
 
I watched it as well. I thought the Boeing people did a pretty good job and the presenters seemed knew the nuts and bolts of the issue and were not just reading bullet points from the slides (amazing for top-level suits). Correctly or not, I came away feeling more confident about the 787.
 
PRR 60 said:
I watched it as well. I thought the Boeing people did a pretty good job and the presenters seemed knew the nuts and bolts of the issue and were not just reading bullet points from the slides (amazing for top-level suits). Correctly or not, I came away feeling more confident about the 787.
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Many of top-level suits at Boeing came from engineering.
 
This one apparently is idle speculation on part of people trying to churn up some news. At least that is the impression I am getting reading the associated discussion in airliners,net. It would be odd to affect ETOPS when a battery failure did not require diversion in the original ETOPS certification. But hey, you never know when technical considerations take a back seat. either :)
 
AV Week reported on the current status of testing and this on repair of grounded 787s in Japan. They have completed certification testing including full, massive overload to 8 cells thermal runaway. I'd like to see that. The new enclosure is stainless steel and the vent system is titanium.
 
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Well British Airways must be confident....they just ordered an addional 18 787's, to their originally ordered 24, with options for more....
 
After reading numerous articles and poring over photos I've come to the conclusion that the 787's battery issue was a major oversight that should have been caught long before it threatened a production aircraft in revenue service. I'm not the kind of person who will go out of my way to avoid the 787 due to non-fatal incidents, but my confidence in the regulatory approval process has dropped considerably over time. Maybe this incident will become a lesson to those who keep pushing for less and less oversight on the premise that self-regulation is more than sufficient.
 
Devil's Advocate said:
After reading numerous articles and poring over photos I've come to the conclusion that the 787's battery issue was a major oversight that should have been caught long before it threatened a production aircraft in revenue service. I'm not the kind of person who will go out of my way to avoid the 787 due to non-fatal incidents, but my confidence in the regulatory approval process has dropped considerably over time. Maybe this incident will become a lesson to those who keep pushing for less and less oversight on the premise that self-regulation is more than sufficient.
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I haven't done the extensive research that you have, but I am wondering if they had done it the way you advocate with stronger government oversight, would they have found that, or possibly other design flaws, for sure?

And at what point would testing and oversight be 'sufficient' before placing new designs into service? All the oversight in the world, and some things will go unseen for a long time before appearing....
 
railiner said:
Devil's Advocate said:
After reading numerous articles and poring over photos I've come to the conclusion that the 787's battery issue was a major oversight that should have been caught long before it threatened a production aircraft in revenue service. I'm not the kind of person who will go out of my way to avoid the 787 due to non-fatal incidents, but my confidence in the regulatory approval process has dropped considerably over time. Maybe this incident will become a lesson to those who keep pushing for less and less oversight on the premise that self-regulation is more than sufficient.
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I haven't done the extensive research that you have, but I am wondering if they had done it the way you advocate with stronger government oversight, would they have found that, or possibly other design flaws, for sure?

And at what point would testing and oversight be 'sufficient' before placing new designs into service? All the oversight in the world, and some things will go unseen for a long time before appearing....
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When to stop testing is one the most famous and difficult questions for system and test engineers. There have been many a paper trying to define and quantify the answer to that question in many engineering disciplines without coming to any definitive general answer. Cynicism on --- in actual practice It is usually answered when the schedule runs out of time and the budget runs out of money.
 
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2020717470_787flighttestxml.html

Wow! Looks like one of the tests involved creating a propane gas explosion inside the containment vessel and completely containing it!

As for testing, in most cases the tests are designed to test for anticipated failure modes. It is hard to design tests for unknown failure modes. Often such is discovered after prolonged operation. The poster child example of that was the Comet 1. It was not like anyone was maliciously avoiding testing it enough. It is just that the state of the art of understanding metal fatigue was not developed enough to anticipate that mode of failure to try testing for it. As a matter of fact initially those failures were recieved with utter bafflement. A series of ingenious tests in water tank running a fuselage through a zillion cycles quickly finally established what the problem was.

In this case what is known is the total of amount of energy release that must be contained to contain a failure. Fortunately the amount of energy is small enough to be able to design a brute force technique to contain it, while taking additional design steps to reduce the chance of requiring such containment.

If many of you ever learn about some of the software fixes that are applied to keep semi-critical systems going while the real fix is worked on, you'd probably all have a collective apoplectic fit. But such is the world of engineering. It is as much about failure prevention by design as it is about mitigation and containbment by design should a failure occur.
 
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jis said:
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2020717470_787flighttestxml.html
Wow! Looks like one of the tests involved creating a propane gas explosion inside the containment vessel and completely containing it!

As for testing, in most cases the tests are designed to test for anticipated failure modes. It is hard to design tests for unknown failure modes. Often such is discovered after prolonged operation. The poster child example of that was the Comet 1. It was not like anyone was maliciously avoiding testing it enough. It is just the the state of the art of understanding metal fatigue was not developed enough to anticipate that mode of failure to try testing for it. As a matter of fact initially those failures were reived with utter bafflement. Finally a series of ingenious tests in water tank running a fuselage through a zillioncycles quickly finally establsihed what the porblem was.

In this case what is known is the total of amount of energy that just be contained to contain a failure, and fortunately the amount of energy is small enough to be able to design a brute force technique to contain it, while taking additional design steps to reduce the chance of requiring such containment.

If many of you ever learn about some of the software fixes that are applied to keep semi-critical systems going while the real fix is worked on, you'd probably all have a collective apoplectic fit. But such is the world of engineering. It is as much about failure prevention as it is about mitigation and containbment should a failure occur.
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Reminds me of those classic films--'No Highway In The Sky', and 'Fate Is The Hunter'.....
 

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