Update on 787 Battery Problems

Securaplane Technologies, the people who built the charger, did test the charger and the battery together, once. The battery caught fire, so they used a battery simulator after that.

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Surely you are joking?

I hope.

Jeroen Belleman

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Investigators report and details on the burning of the building and the alleged culprit or scapegoat depending on your point of view: However, I know nothing about how the battery assemblies were subsequently tested.

Your is the best response in the entire thread.

Design a battery, and give it a set of specs that it "meets or beats". Except with batteries, they usually do not have a very wide window past "meets".

So, then one buys or designs a battery charging and maintenance system that meets the full rate charging requisite specs for the battery on grounded craft. Then you lock that rate out when flying and program an in-flight maximum sustaining charge rate.

OR, you design a charger that is for in flight only and it NEVER can be made to charge at a greater than an optimal while-in-use rate, and make the full rate charger a ground only piece of gear.

But hell... NEVER test the two as bought, as built devices together!

Never put *THAT* system through deep cycling or high current draw use, much less failure mode tests! NO... DO NOT DO THAT!!!

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Sorry, no joke. I read that in Aviation Week, a very reliable source.

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The agency's investigation found among other things no record of the final production-standard charging system having been tested with the actual GS Yuasa-made battery. According to the NTSB report, Securiplane, the charging system developer, tested the unit with a simulated electric load instead of an actual battery. The company apparently took this precaution after having earlier suffered a fire at its facility during battery testing. Yikes...

Sure would feel a lot safer if they would throw a few car batteries in there. I mean, it is just used to start a small APU turbine, right? This must be a political need to help save the failing Lithium (car) battery industry, right?

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Yikes squared. I tell all my engineers and test people that when something weird happens, even if it goes away, Investigate! It will probably happen again.

NASA lost two shuttles by looking away from problems.

To save weight and fuel. Every pound costs something absurd like a million dollars over the life of a plane.

NASA's failures makes for a long list and a very high cost to taxpayers.

Any business run the same way would have long failed.

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Wow! The mind boggles. Here they have a flaming demonstration that something's seriously wrong and they decide to look the other way! Astonishing. Simply unbelievably stupid.

Jeroen Belleman

I recall reading that as well. Thanks for reminding me.

Guess they should have done a root-cause analysis.

Joe Gwinn

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Did anyone other than Boeing have the responsibility for verifying the battery/charger system?

Presumably Securaplane verified that the charger met all the ICD specifications that they were given. It's not really their problem if the particular battery sample they had caught fire or exploded when the ICD was followed (other than the ethical necessity of notifying Boeing or whoever they were working directly with of the anomaly).

It's looking like some folks at Boeing should be out of a job real soon now.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Nope. The American way is to promote the guilty (to get them out of the way) and to persecute the innocent. However, this will take some time. We're still in the witch hunt for a guilty culprit phase of the project.

This might offer a clue of things to come on the 787 line::

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That guy sounds like all the bad-attitude folks I've ever seen on the job, and more besides, rolled into one with sprinkles on top.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Must have been people internally transplaced from their Defense Systems division...

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division...

Former ICE employees ?:-} ...Jim Thompson

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And don't call me Shirley.

Yep. However, there are some unanswered questions which bother me. I try to look for what such reports leave out, or what's missing:

1. On Pg 40, it says "Leon worked a total of 2,564.19 hours in calendar year 2006." It doesn't say how many days per year he worked, so I'll make a guess(tm): Hrs/day Working days per year 13 197 12 214 11 233 10 256 9 284 8 320 There are about 200 working days per year, or 260 non-weekend days. If the 2564 hrs figure is true, Leon either was working 6 days per week continuously, or working long hours on the traditional 200 working days plan, or his time card was "padded" with extra hours. Either time schedule is guaranteed to create fatigue from overwork. In

1. I was wondering how the administration building could burn down, when presumably the battery testing was done in another building. So much for accurate news reporting. Apparently, it was all one building: "A worker put out the fire, but there was another explosion. That's when the worker got out." So, if the first fire was out, what caused the 2nd explosion? Other batteries? 10,000 sq ft for 50 employees is 200 sq-ft per employee. That's about right if there's nothing stored on site: However, this was a manufacturing business, which presumably stored parts and finished goods in the building. At a liberal 50% for storage, that brings it down to 100 sq-ft per employee, which is seriously cramped.

Anyone who has ever worked with explosive devices knows better than to store potentially explosive materials in an assembly or test area. Securaplane looks too well organized to make such a fundamental safety mistake. However, the same company also doesn't seem to understand the need for a system test, so perhaps all the due diligence sprinkled throughout the report is a smoke screen? Dunno.

The building looks like mostly concrete block construction and steel roof. So, what's burning to justify a 3 alarm fire? The yellow-orange color comes from incandescence of unburnt carbon particles, which covers too many possibilities.

Also, the fire started at about 9AM, presumably about an hour after Leon arrived. Most industrial accidents occur later in the day, when people are more tired and less careful.

1. The chronology of Leon's employment at Securaplane seems too well documented. There are no holes, no lapses of memory, no inconsistencies, and little in Leon's favor. Leon appears as evil incarnate, but that's rarely the case with such employees. Even the worst employee has their good points, which are suppose to be documented in such investigations. It's just too neat and clean.

There are several other oddities that bother me, but as in the three I've itemized, there's nothing substantial. Just oddities that make me suspicious of the investigation report.