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Do you know what the word 'hypothesis' means? Its a theory, something to be tested - its no fact, no statement of truth, just pure conjecture that something ha

Do you know what the word 'hypothesis' means? Its a theory, something to be tested - its no fact, no statement of truth, just pure conjecture that something has gone wrong with the Boeing group. You don't get this far into the 787 project, to be defeated by a faulty battery design, unless something is seriously wrong with the engineering processes. Unless management, senior to engineering in the grand scheme of things, has screwed up somewhere. This much is clear. That the battery catches fire in an operational plane -i.e. its no longer in the test phases, but actually certified and operational - yet none of the billion-dollar Boeing process caught this issue beforehand - is of EXTREME INTEREST to the tech community, and in that context there is absolutely no reason why the issue shouldn't be discussed, openly, as such. Look: Someone really, really screwed up. Its a Billion-Dollar project, being crippled by a fundamental design flaw - this proves the value of the circumstances to the tech community, for which the motivation for discussing this incident is, mostly, derived from an interest in the process failure. That the battery is flawed somehow, that the fuel control system is flawed, somehow, that the fire suppression systems don't work so great - this is not so great news, perhaps, technologically, unless we have access to the real data: but that the Process by which Boeing produced a crap expensive product, in spite of billions of dollars of investment, IS very interesting news.

akiselev 14y ago
Remember when Toshiba recalled a ton of their laptops for problems with the lithium batteries? They had tens if not hundreds of thousands of those batteries deployed before the problem became evident. The Boeing batteries are significantly more expensive and higher capacity than laptop batteries which results in longer and more complicated testing procedures. Not to mention needing to test the many various load conditions on the battery. At the end of the day, there is only so much you can do to test a technology before deploying it. There is a chance that Boeing, it's contractors, or manufacturers were negligent in their testing especially after the initial delays of a $32 BILLION program. However, I'm guessing the battery problem is the result of standards not fully prepared to test the battery technology.

akiselev 14y ago

Remember when Toshiba recalled a ton of their laptops for problems with the lithium batteries? They had tens if not hundreds of thousands of those batteries deployed before the problem became evident. The Boeing batteries are significantly more expensive and higher capacity than laptop batteries which results in longer and more complicated testing procedures. Not to mention needing to test the many various load conditions on the battery. At the end of the day, there is only so much you can do to test a technology before deploying it. There is a chance that Boeing, it's contractors, or manufacturers were negligent in their testing especially after the initial delays of a $32 BILLION program. However, I'm guessing the battery problem is the result of standards not fully prepared to test the battery technology.