Another B787 Fire?

[J.O.]

Word has it that fire cover for the LHR airport has been NOTAMed at zero as they are fighting a fire on an Ethiopian B787 that's sitting on the gate.

https://mobile.twitter.com/DaPakiGuy/status/355716645118943234/photo/1

[dagger]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23294760

Doesn't look like a battery issue... fire was at top of fuselage, at base of tail.

[Thebean]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23294760

Doesn't look like a battery issue... fire was at top of fuselage, at base of tail.

You can understand why airlines are going to be a little reticent to buy new, unproven technology over the next few years and stick with what's tried and true instead.

People aren't exactly knocking the doors down at Bombardier over the C series and the SSJ is pretty much dead in the water.

You won't see me on a 787 anytime soon. I'll think about it after they've gone at least 6 months without making the news.

The fire at LHR apparently shutdown the airport for 90 minutes. How much do you want to bet there are senior people at LHR that would be just as happy to ban 787 ops until these issues have been completely ironed out.

[Seeker]

Yeah, I'm was gonna bid to fly it next year - may be changing that plan. I fear the 787 will end up being another Comet or Electra - eventually the problems will get fixed but not before the industry has moved on.

[Don Hudson]

Bit closer in on the fuselage top.

This isn't batteries, (see battery location below):

Battery location:

[conehead]

I wonder if the APU generator lines run through that area of the ceiling? Or do they go down, underneath the cabin floorboards?

[Maverick]

This one could be worse than the battery fires. That is significant fire damage there. CP Air had a DC-10 that had a fire similar to that in AMS and they almost wrote the aircraft off.

Airbus must be licking their chops at this news. Not sure how accurate this picture is but it does show electrical equipment in this area.

[Seeker]

This one could be worse than the battery fires. That is significant fire damage there. CP Air had a DC-10 that had a fire similar to that in AMS and they almost wrote the aircraft off.

I'm no aeronautical engineer but I'm already predicting that plane is a write-off. Fire damage right there, so near the fin? It's done for.

[Super 80]

Airbus must be licking their chops at this news.

The most trash talk you will get out of them on the subject is the A330's sales performance after the launch of the supposed "A330-Killer".

[Maverick]

I'm no aeronautical engineer but I'm already predicting that plane is a write-off. Fire damage right there, so near the fin? It's done for.

You may be right. Unless this is sabotage or something completely one-off Boeing is in deep trouble.

[Don Hudson]

Well, we'll be getting a first-hand look at how Boeing and/or the wider industry actually repair damage to carbon-fibre structures mainly because they'll want everyone to know it can be done.

I wonder how doublers and plates are done in carbon fibre structures and what it may add to the aircraft weight. IIRC, the repair to the QANTAS A380 added about 90kg to the aircraft weight and ran about US$140m.

The NTSB is busy.

[J.O.]

I predict that it will take an act of Congress to keep Boeing from repairing that airplane. The optics of it being written off are very, very bad.

[inchman]

I was delayed in LHR Friday night due to this fire. It was on the stands adjacent to Echo twy, literally right beside the fire station. We taxied out on F but did not see the damage to the upper fuselage.

One thing that bothered me the most was that they shut down the entire airport for about an hour ("temporarily" according to BAA... remember these guys are the same guys who closed an airport for 3 days because of 2 inches of snow) while CFR was "busy" with an aircraft about as far from runways as you can get in LHR, with no passengers or crew on board.

I understand the desire to save the airframe (if it can be saved), but it would seem to me that, given the uncritical (from the perspective of human safety) situation around this aircraft, it would be easy for CFR to abandon this situation in the unlikely event of a subsequent crash with passengers.

We had a couple dozen pax miss connections off our flight, but there must have been dozens of diversions, delays and canceled flights and hundreds, if not thousands, of downline misconnects associated as a result of the "Cat Zero" firefighting decision that was made around this fire.

I might be wrong, but a zero-passenger fire with no runway impact should not be closing an airport, especially one of the top few in the world.

[Fido]

Inchman:

I think you are totally correct. The idea of closing one of the busiest airports in the world for such a reason just boggles the mind.

But then, officialdom every where has lost common sense.

[Don Hudson]

Another point of view:

It depends upon what was known at what point in time when the fire-on-board call was first made. We would all expect an immediate response to "fire", and determine later what the airplane was carrying, if anything/anyone including the crew. We know from long experience here (mainly in Toronto) that any event that disrupts the planned flow into and out of the airport has an enormous downline effect which takes days to recover from. It is the nature of the business we are in where scheduling is extremely tight with no slot into which such large alterations to all airlines' schedules and gate-use can be squeezed.

[blues deville]

These 787 events appear to demonstrate the risk of outsourcing aircraft systems and the structures. However, home grown stuff can fail too.

Back in the late 1960's when Nordair received their first 737-200 CF-NAB, an APU fire scorched the rudder after repeated starts were unsuccessful. The fault was finally traced to a fuel drain design flaw in the Garret-Air Research (Phoenix, AZ) unit. Boeing engineers during a conference call said this could not happen. Nordair maintenance told them it could and did with the precise reason why. The fuel drain issue was eventually confirmed by Boeing and Garrett modified their APU's.

Perhaps these 787 problems are a quality control issue with Boeing. I recently flew a new 777 that had 38 hours on the air frame. I looked back at the previous log book pages to see where it had flown and found my trip was its third revenue flight. The log history showed the aircraft was released for an acceptance flight from Boeing after 3 hours of test flying. The following flight with company pilots and Boeing revealed a serious rigging problem with both aileron and rudder controls. The next flight had air conditioning issues and several air ducts were found to be lose throughout the cabin. A third and final acceptance flight was successful.

This Boeing aircraft has been in production for more than 15 years and is a proven winner for the

manufacturer. Perhaps this is a "one of" issue or could Boeing be having some quality control problems on their production lines?

[Seeker]

Right now there are a few thousand Boeing executives and engineers who are praying that the cause turns out to be an FA who decided it would be OK to leave her butane-powered curling iron to warm up while she went to the galley or maybe someone who decided to cook a Mr. Noodles on a bargain store hotplate in the crew rest facility.

[B75/76]

This was posted on Pprune:

"The aircraft fire is unrelated to the batteries. This will be confirmed tomorrow in a boeing press conference. Fire is strongly believed to be as a result of galley overheat - failure of coffee heater trip switch which was left on.Burnt out much of the galley and area above causing deep damage to aft bh and rudder/elevator system. Aircraft sadly a write off - unless pride of hull loss/p.r dictates repair even if economically un-viable."

I would say Boeing will be relieved if this is true.

[J.O.]

The fire coverage situation was a little more complicated than just the B787 fire.

LHR was two CAT 9 firehalls to facilitate the coverage requirements of a very busy airport. Unfortunately at the same time as the B787 fire, the other fire hall was dealing with an aircraft fire on a Pakistani B777 on the other side of the airport. This one had people on board. While the trucks that attended the B787 could have been called away, they'd have been doing so with empty foam tanks as they'd emptied them fighting the fire. Unlike this part of the world where there's some vagueness in the regulatory requirements for fire coverage, the UK rules are very clear on the matter for commercial operations. No ops are permitted if the airport doesn't have adequate fire service capablities for the aircraft type.

[boestar]

and this is more critical atone of the busiest airports in the world.

[dagger]

There is a quote from the AVHerald on Pprune saying that we will be told the cause of the fire today, evidently galley equip left turned on and resulted in fire. I took a look at the AVherald site and there was no mention of the incident at all, maybe it got pulled or perhaps the quote on Pprune was not "real". http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518971-ethiopean-787-fire-heathrow-9.html#post7938551

It's odd if it's a galley fire. My coffee maker and toaster oven have automatic shutoff features. My computers have sleep functions. But an unattended gallery oven left on can causes many millions of dollars to a parked aircraft?

[blues deville]

So this aircraft is a write off? Does Ethiopean send It back to Seattle and ask for a 787, medium rare this time.

[inchman]

The fire coverage situation was a little more complicated than just the B787 fire.

LHR was two CAT 9 firehalls to facilitate the coverage requirements of a very busy airport. Unfortunately at the same time as the B787 fire, the other fire hall was dealing with an aircraft fire on a Pakistani B777 on the other side of the airport. This one had people on board. While the trucks that attended the B787 could have been called away, they'd have been doing so with empty foam tanks as they'd emptied them fighting the fire. Unlike this part of the world where there's some vagueness in the regulatory requirements for fire coverage, the UK rules are very clear on the matter for commercial operations. No ops are permitted if the airport doesn't have adequate fire service capablities for the aircraft type.

Oh... I was not aware of the Pakistani fire. That certainly explains the reduction and the ground stop.

By the same token... not allowing landings causing diversions and "saturating" (their word, not mine) the airspace reduces safety, too. There has to be a happy median.

They didn't unload entire trucks on the Ethiopian nor did they have to stick around for an hour (they do have infrared sensors, so they do know if a fire is out), so while a short ground stop might have been warranted, I don't think they had to hang around for as long as they did, but I'm no firefighter, so I may be trivializing it a bit too much.

[props2you]

Let's all take a moment to thank Uncle Miltie for not re-equipping with A330 variants when he had the chance and instead going with the plastic fantastic plane. Without his foresight Rogue would be much closer to a full-fledged airline.

[internet]

You have company:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2013/05/22/delta-will-wait-for-new-planes-to-prove-themselves-ceo/

U.S. carrier Delta Air Lines will watch the wave of orders for the latest Airbus and Boeing planes roll on by and wait for the jets to prove themselves before ordering any, its chief executive told Reuters...