LITTLE ROCK — In December 2006, the Federal Aviation Administration allowed Airbus, the European plane maker, to use 14-ounce lithium-ion batteries to provide standby power for the emergency lighting system of its new A380 jumbo jet.
Ten months later, the agency allowed Boeing to use the same potentially volatile type of battery on its new 787 plane. But in Boeing’s case, the batteries weighed 63 pounds each and were to be used in critical flight systems as well as to provide backup power. The larger battery also would be charged and discharged much more often.
Yet the agency’s ruling used identical language - it could have been cut and pasted - in laying out the broad safeguards for Boeing’s use of the batteries.
The use of lithium batteries in the 787 is now at the center of Boeing’s difficulties. The plane maker has staked its reputation on the success of the 787, an aircraft it nicknamed the Dreamliner. All 50 787s delivered to airlines worldwide were grounded last week until investigators in the United States and Japan find out why two lithium batteries failed in recent weeks, causing a fire on one 787 and damage to another that led to an emergency landing.
It also raises fundamental questions about how federal regulators certify new technology and how they balance advances in airplane design and engineering with ensuring safety in commercial flying. In addition to finding out what went wrong, these issues will be examined in a federal investigation and at future Senate hearings.
When it approved Boeing’s request in 2007, the FAA said it had limited experience with the use of lithium-ion batteries in commercial airplanes, though it acknowledged that the batteries themselves were more prone to fire than traditional nickel-cadmium or lead-acid batteries.
Still, the agency approved the technology on the assumption that Boeing could make the batteries work and that computer controls could prevent batteries from overcharging or overheating. The agency also specified that any fire or toxic leak be contained and not damage any surrounding electrical systems.
At the same time, the agency brushed off concerns raised in 2006 and 2007 by the Air Line Pilots Association that an inflight fire would be difficult to extinguish and that flight crews should be given extra training.
“We have concluded that providing a means for controlling or extinguishing a fire - such as stopping the flow of fluids, shutting down equipment, or fireproof equipment” was an “adequate alternative to requiring the flight or cabin crew to use extinguishing agents,” the agency said in its 2006 decision about the Airbus A380.
Experts said that regardless of the cause of the 787’s problems, the charred remains of the battery that caught fire earlier this month in a plane in Boston raised the question of whether the safeguards functioned properly.
On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the battery fire in Boston, said that all eight cells in the battery had sustained “varying degrees of thermal damage.” Six cells have been scanned and disassembled for further examination.
Many battery experts said they viewed Boeing’s decision to use lithium-ion batteries as reasonable, pointing out that lithium-ion batteries have also been used in expensive space satellites since the turn of the century without serious problems. That track record would have added to the confidence Boeing and federal regulators had about using them in commercial airliners, they said.
Jay F. Whitacre, an associate professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said GS Yuasa, the Japanese company that built the 787 batteries, told NASA in a 2008 presentation that it had already supplied batteries for six satellites and had contracts for 50 more. GS Yuasa also said that its satellite batteries had never had a shorting incident in more than 10 years of production.
“If I had all that data and saw that they were making batteries for 50 more satellites, I’d say that was a reasonable risk to take,” Whitacre said. “My sense is that Boeing did a fairly decent job of picking the right company.”
But another battery expert, Donald Sadoway, a materials chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, disagreed. He said that sticking with an older type of battery instead of the lighter lithium battery would not have made a huge difference to the 787, adding about 40 pounds, or the equivalent of an extra suitcase per battery.
“So you will risk the plane for something that’s tantamount to one guy’s suitcase?” Sadoway said. With plane makers pushing the envelope on new technology, safety experts have questioned whether federal regulators had the expertise or the manpower to properly oversee those developments.
Michael P. Huerta, the FAA’s administrator, on Wednesday defended his agency’s handling of the process as well as its expertise to assess new technology in airplanes. The agency, he said, also has the ability to call in outside experts, if needed. He added that federal regulators would not lift the 787’s grounding order until they had fully reviewed its critical systems and understood why the batteries had failed.
Lithium-ion batteries have many advantages over traditional batteries. They are lighter, can be recharged faster and more often, and provide substantially more power than other batteries of the same size.
For that reason, lithium-ion cells have become the norm in rechargeable consumer electronics. But in 2006, manufacturing defects in some batteries that caused them to catch fire led computer makers to recall nearly 10 million laptops.
Safety regulators, however, were more worried about the instances when the batteries caught fire in the cargo hold of an aircraft, or while being carried by passengers. Federal authorities in 2004 prohibited non-rechargeable lithium-ion batteries from being transported aboard passenger planes as cargo. That ruling was reinforced in August 2007, just two months before the Boeing request was approved.
FAA officials said they oversaw Boeing’s laboratory tests of the new batteries. Boeing has said that its military business had begun a program to select lithium-ion batteries for its satellites in 2003 and that its engineers felt they understood the potential hazards.
Mike Sinnett, Boeing’s top engineer on the 787 program, said recently that the company had built a system with multiple layers of protection that it thought would keep the batteries from overheating and contain any problem.
The computerized controls are supposed to shut down the battery if it develops a problem, and the battery is supposed to keep a short in any one of its eight cells from spreading to the others. If any fumes or flames escape, Boeing said, the pressurized air system will help keep smoke out of the cabin and vent it outside.
But neither the FAA nor Boeing made any changes with the 787 when the agency forced Cessna to replace the lithium-ion batteries on its CJ4 business jet with nickel-cadmium ones after a battery fire in October 2011, three weeks before the first 787 made its inaugural airline flight.
Information for this report was contributed by Matthew L. Wald of The New York Times.
Business, Pages 19 on 01/28/2013