A number of entry-into-service problems, including fuel pump leaks and engine fan shaft fractures, had been reported but were considered ordinary shake-out stuff that operators come to expect with new designs. The battery fire, however, was no minor issue.
Fire, smoke, and airplanes don’t mix—ever. Or as Captain Blaszczak told me, “If there is any indication of smoke or fire, the definition of eternity is from now until we get this airplane on the ground.”
Fire is not a common occurrence in air disasters. About 16 percent of commercial aircraft accidents involve fires; less frequently are they the cause. That is because a lot of effort has gone into minimizing the risk, which is a difficult task, considering that combustion is what makes the engines run. The attention paid to fire prevention is so great because an in-flight fire can quickly turn to catastrophe.
On a Swissair flight from New York to Geneva in 1998, pilots mistook smoke in the cockpit as a minor air-conditioning issue. Trying to identify the source delayed by four minutes how they dealt with what turned out to be an electrical fire in the space above the cockpit ceiling. Arcing, a high-temperature electrical discharge across a gap in wiring, had ignited highly flammable insulation material, and the fire spread quickly. Just twenty-one minutes passed between the first smell of smoke and the plane slamming into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing all 229 aboard.
In its report on the accident,9 the Transportation Safety Board of Canada concluded that pilots dealing with fire have between five and thirty-five minutes to get the plane on the ground. That’s it.
Swissair 111 “was a seminal event in aviation history,” said Jim Shaw, an airline captain who participated in the accident probe on behalf of the Air Line Pilots Association. There were a lot of lessons learned. One of the most important to Shaw was the error in the FAA’s decision to allow McDonnell Douglas to continue to use metallized Mylar (polyethylene terephthalate, if you really want to know) to insulate the walls of its airliners, even after other safety authorities determined it was flammable.
It was a curious decision. In the decades leading to the accident, airplane manufacturers had been ordered to replace all sorts of interior fabrics and materials with those that were fire-retarding and flame-resistant. Seats, dividing walls, carpets, curtains—all these had to be made of substances that were slow to ignite and self-extinguishing, meaning that if a fire were to start, it could not spread more than a few inches. The rules went into effect on all planes built after 1990 and included the MD-11 that flew as Swissair Flight 111.
So, naturally, you are wondering if the metallized Mylar was flammable, why was it on the Swissair airplane in the first place. The answer is that it wasn’t prohibited because it was used away from fire zones. Absent an ignition source, the flammability of the insulation material didn’t matter, or so the thinking went at the time.
It did matter, though, because power cables, light fixtures, battery packs, and electrical wires all ran throughout the insulated area. A spark from any one of them could trigger a fire, which is what happened with Swissair 111.
After the crash, safety regulators said metallized Mylar had to be removed from twelve hundred airplanes. The effort took years, and by the time the last of it was being pulled out, Boeing was trying to convince the FAA that another highly flammable material, lithium-ion cobalt-oxide batteries, should be allowed to power the new plane the company was designing, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
Powerhouse
In the post-9/11 world, the twin-engine, mid-capacity, long-haul airliner on Boeing’s drawing board was the most eagerly anticipated airplane since the Boeing 747, which had redefined travel in the 1970s by opening up the skies to everyone. Forty years later, the 787 was going to allow airlines to fly between far-flung secondary cities without having to rely on masses of passengers to fill the plane. Sure, any airline could sell four hundred fifty seats on a London-to-New York flight, but the markets between Houston and Lagos, Auckland and San Francisco, Toronto and Tel Aviv, would be thinner. A smaller and more fuel-efficient airplane that could fly eight thousand miles, nearly one-third of the way around the globe, would be a showstopper.
Two things made the Dreamliner different from any other airliner at the time. The first was that Boeing had eliminated vast amounts of aluminum in the plane’s structure, just as de Havilland had done decades earlier. Where de Havilland simply used thinner metal (and wound up making it thicker in later models), Boeing replaced aluminum with stronger but lighter-weight carbon fiber.
The second differentiation was all twenty-first century: the plane would have an unparalleled reliance on electricity. Six generators would convert energy from the engines to electrical power, creating five times as much as any other airliner, enough to power four hundred homes, the Boeing press material claimed. The 787 would be a virtual power plant in the sky, supplying its own needs, and they were mighty. Boeing replaced mechanical flight controls and their heavy stainless-steel cables with electromechanical controls that activated cabin pressurization, brakes, spoilers, the stabilizer, and wing ice protection.
A critical part of this new energy production, storage, and distribution plan was the use of two powerful lithium-ion ships batteries, which would provide start-up power and supply some emergency electronics, lighting, and independent power for the black boxes.
Not all lithium-ion batteries are alike. There are manganese, iron phosphate, titanate, sulfur, iodine, and nickel. Each element or compound offered some benefit and some drawback. The names refer to the combination of materials used to move ions from one chemically coated thin strip of metal, through a thin permeable sheet, to another chemically coated strip, all of which is wound into a jelly roll shape and placed in a metal can, then sealed and called a cell. The motion of the ions generates electricity. The electricity is collected and stored until it is called on to deliver power. And now you know how batteries work.
Of all the lithium-ion battery recipes, the one called cobalt oxide had the best energy-to-mass ratio, meaning it gave the most energy for the least weight and size. It had other features that made it desirable: It charged quickly and held a charge longer than others. It was slightly more expensive than lead-acid batteries, but because it was already a widely produced item, the cost was below that of any of the other chemistries.
Jeff Dahn, a professor of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, pointed out, however, that for what Boeing was trying to achieve, cobalt oxide was “not well suited” because it “has inferior safety properties compared to other alternatives.” He was referring to what has been reported to be the largest industrial recall ever.
In 1991, Sony Energy Devices of Japan held the patent for one of the formulas used to produce cobalt-oxide lithium-ion. About thirteen years later, it was a multibillion-dollar product, powering all kinds of what are called 3 C devices: those used in computer, communication, and consumer electronics.
The batteries had a tendency to heat up on their own, progressing to fire and explosion, according to a paper produced for the International Association for Fire Safety Science in 2005. Some of the spontaneous combustion events had been filmed and uploaded to YouTube, where anybody could view alarming videos of cell phones and laptops sputtering and emitting tongues of flame in airport boarding areas and at office meetings.
At the time Boeing selected lithium-ion, in 2006, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission was issuing recalls for the batteries powering the devices sold by Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, Apple, and others. About four million battery packs sold by Dell alone were ordered off the market in August of that year. “Consumers should stop using these recalled batteries immediately and contact Dell to receive a replacement battery,” one commission recall notice read.
This was all big news, but at the same time at the FAA, Boeing was pushing a plan to use lithium-ion batteries on the Dreamliner. It was progressing through the bureaucracy with some caution, but little public attention. The FAA told Boeing that if
it wanted to use the technology, it would have to meet the terms of a special condition, because nothing in the existing regulations governing airliner design addressed this “novel technology.”
There was limited experience, according to the FAA, and what experience there was wasn’t good. When the FAA asked the public to chime in, just one organization did, the union representing the pilots who would ultimately fly the airplane.
“We got involved because we’ve always had issues,” said Keith Hagy, the ALPA safety director, explaining why the union wrote several letters to the FAA during the process. Hagy wasn’t so confident Boeing could achieve safety on the 787 while using batteries with such a troubled past. “Once they start burning, they never go out,” he said.
ALPA was not standing on a deep well of research. So sparse was the material publicly available that it relied on just one document, the FAA’s “September 2006, Flammability Assessment of Bulk-Packed, Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Cells in Transport Category Aircraft,” and that wasn’t even focused on powering an airplane with lithium-ion; it was about how airlines should pack the batteries if they were being sent as cargo. What struck Hagy is that even Boeing didn’t know much about the batteries.
Whether the information wasn’t there or the effort to get it was ineffective, people in the battery industry dispute the notion that lithium-ion batteries were a new frontier. Maybe they weren’t being used on airplanes, but they’d been under review by NASA since 2000. Boeing’s space division generates ten billion dollars a year, roughly 12 percent of the company’s total revenues on average, but according to one scientist with knowledge of the battery development, no one from the company’s space side was ever asked to provide information or expertise to the commercial airplane division or even to review the Dreamliner battery design until after the events in January 2013.
Nor does it seem that the experience of automakers was sought even though they had been working on electric cars for nearly a decade. The Tesla Roadster, a high-end electric car, was being developed in 2006 using the same cobalt-oxide formulation as Boeing, but the two companies were not sharing information.
Through the summer and into the fall of 2006, the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recalls continued. One computer company after another was telling customers to stop using the batteries that came with their laptops and to request a free replacement. And just as doggedly, Boeing kept working on the design of the lithium-ion battery system it would put on the Dreamliner. The day before Halloween, another round of recalls of nearly a hundred thousand batteries was announced. One week later, on November 7, 2006, the news became personal for Boeing.
A fifty-pound prototype, so expensive to produce and so chock-full of power it was called the “Ferrari of batteries,” had been delivered to the Arizona headquarters of Securaplane Technologies from the Japanese maker GS Yuasa. It wasn’t the final product, but it was what Securaplane was going to use to test the charger, its contribution to the power generation system on the Dreamliner.
Michael Leon, a technician at Securaplane, was one of those assigned to work on the test, but the battery made him nervous. Earlier, there was a short circuit between the terminals. Workers immediately removed the current, but not quickly enough to prevent a second short circuit. Leon didn’t want to use the battery again, but executives at GS Yuasa were untroubled. Analyzing the data sent by Securaplane after the first short circuits, the Japanese said that, with proper handling, the battery would be fine for continued use.
Then, on November 7, the battery ignited and exploded. Leon told the Arizona Daily Star that flames were leaping ten feet in the air. “The magnitude of that energy is indescribable,” he said. No one was hurt, but the company’s administration building was destroyed. For everyone involved, it was a multimillion-dollar lesson in unknown dangers. Boeing reevaluated its selection of lithium-ion and considered swapping it for lithium-manganese, but didn’t.
Everyone went back to work: GS Yuasa on the battery, Securaplane on the charger, and the French company Thales, which had been hired by Boeing to oversee it all.
Primarily, everyone working on the battery design was concerned that in the process of charging the battery, too much power had been pushed into a cell, causing it to heat up and ignite. So they added a contactor that would disconnect the battery from the power supply. It would take the battery out of commission, bricking it for the rest of the flight, but that was considered the lesser of two evils.
In April 2007, the FAA published a two-page special rule in the Federal Register that would give Boeing the go-ahead to use lithium-ion batteries on its new airliner, provided it met certain conditions. The FAA addressed the battery’s persnickety nature using aviation’s four letter F-word, fire, and some other bad words, such as flammability, explosion, and toxic gases. Boeing would have to make sure cells didn’t heat up uncontrollably, cause the failure of adjacent cells, catch fire, explode, or emit toxic gases. The plane maker was still a long way away from being able to claim it accomplished this, and in fact, it never could. Then, in July 2009, a new hurdle emerged.
Engineers at a Hamilton Sundstrand lab in Rockford, Illinois, were plugging together 787 hardware to see how it all worked as a system. The answer was “not well.” One of the cells heated up uncontrollably, spewing electrolyte and causing the entire battery to fail. Boeing had a second round of second thoughts. Lithium-manganese and nickel-cadmium battery alternatives were briefly put back on the table. Yet, really, “ni-cad” offered only a little more than a tenth of the power for start-up as lithium-ion, and the company still didn’t like manganese, so once again Boeing stuck with its original choice.
“If they understood the risks, they never would have done it,” said Lewis Larsen, a Chicago entrepreneur and theoretical physicist whose work requires him to know about this chemistry. In 2010 he sent a presentation to Boeing and all the automobile companies with similar plans to use cobalt-oxide lithium-ion batteries for power. Through his company, Lattice Energy LLC, Larsen has been tinkering with lithium-ion because of the very characteristic that makes the batteries so inherently unsafe: the microscopically small, naturally occurring dendrites that grow inside cells over time, creating a pathway for internal electrical shorts called field failures. These miniature flash fire-balls generate temperatures between five thousand and ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. They are called LENRs, for “low-energy nuclear reactions.” Larsen studies LENRs because he thinks they can be used as a source of green energy.
As a feature of a battery that will be used on an airplane, however, the idea of flash fireballs ought to set off alarm bells. Writing for the Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology in 2012, Brian Barnett said that field failures could create “violent flaming and extremely high temperatures” as well as explosive combustion. “Most safety tests carried out in the laboratory or factory do not replicate the conditions by which safety incidents actually occur,” Barnett wrote.
This was the nature of the message Larsen sent off to Boeing. He told me, “We thought it was a moral issue to make some public statements about what Lattice knew technically at that time, so we did.” Larsen said he heard back from a contact at the company, who told him that ten battery experts had assured Boeing that Larsen “was full of shit.”
Thermal Fratricide
In the fall of 2011, the first Dreamliner was delivered to All Nippon Airlines, complete with the two ships batteries that had been the subject of so much tinkering. The following spring, the airline reported that not only was it pleased with the airplane, but its customers were also. Nine out of ten passengers said the 787 met or exceeded expectations, ANA reported. Who pays close attention to the model of airplane on which they fly? The Japanese. Eighty-eight percent of Japanese travelers surveyed were familiar with the Dreamliner when they boarded their flight.
Koichi Hirata, fifty-seven, was on his way to attend the InterNepcon electronics show in Tokyo on January 16, 2013, and, like those other happy ANA cust
omers, he was looking forward to flying in the 787. He had a business-class window seat on the right side of the airplane, and he was listening to Rakugo, a traditional form of Japanese comedic storytelling on the in-flight entertainment system. He noticed right away when the plane turned and started to descend.
“The passengers didn’t get into a panic, and cabin attendants seemed to be making emergency landing preparations with great efficiency,” he recalled later. Once the plane was on the ground in Takamatsu and stopped in a cleared area of the taxiway, Hirata saw smoke being drawn into the engine on the right side, behind where he was seated. He didn’t have much time to think about it because the flight attendants were telling the passengers to leave their things, take the emergency slides, and get away from the plane. Hirata said that between the smoke and the rapid rush to the exits, he wondered if the incident was “something far more serious.” As far as he and his fellow passengers were concerned, the answer was no. Yet for Boeing, ANA, and the four dozen other airlines that had invested in this airplane, the answer was an unequivocal yes.
The JAL battery fire in Boston nine days earlier had been alarming, but until this ANA episode in Japan, the reaction of aviation officials had been to suggest that the battery meltdown was a one-off. The then-administrator of the FAA, Michael Huerta, had even gone so far as to hold a reassuring news conference with Boeing CEO Ray Conner by his side, at which he said that “nothing we have seen leads us to believe the airplane is not safe.” That was January 11, five days before the emergency landing at Takamatsu. The second event resulted in the decision to ground the fleet worldwide.
In just over a week, the world’s newest airliner experienced two incidents that the safety board’s then-chairman characterized as unprecedented and serious. “We do not expect to see fire events on aircraft,” then-NTSB board member Deborah Hersman told reporters.
The Crash Detectives Page 15
