In terms of news media coverage, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is roughly in the same league as the newborn royal prince: The headlines are unceasing, try as you might to escape them. After its grounding by U.S. regulators early this year, each 787 flight that is now canceled, diverted, or delayed—regardless of how significant the cause—puts the new airplane back in the spotlight.
There are plenty of good reasons for this scrutiny, chief among them the battery-related fires in two of the incidents—and fire is among the worst things to have occur in flight. In January, a Japan Airlines 787 caught fire while parked in Boston, less than two weeks before an All Nippon Airways 787 made an emergency landing on a domestic flight in Japan when a problem with the plane’s lithium ion batteries was detected. Those incidents prompted regulators to ground the jet for three months as Boeing redesigned and fortified the batteries’ enclosure. Problem solved, right? That’s why a fire this month on an Ethiopian Airlines 787 in London put the issue again front and center and renewed questions about the jet. “With a fire, the 787 has fallen in the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God category,” Scott Hamilton, managing director of aviation consulting firm Leeham, wrote in an e-mail this week. “Had JAL or Ethiopian occurred while airborne, these could have been tragic outcomes.”
