Dreamliner is safe

Ethiopian Airlines said on Saturday it would continue to operate its fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners after one of them caught fire at London’s Heathrow airport.

Ethiopian Airlines said on Saturday it would continue to operate its fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners after one of them caught fire at London’s Heathrow airport.

“We have not grounded any of our aircraft,” the carrier’s public relations department said by email. “The incident at Heathrow happened while the plane was on the ground and had been for more than eight hours and was not related to flight safety.”

Asked whether the airline has determined the cause of the fire, Ethiopian Airlines said: “There is no new development. No safety issue. The incident is being investigated to determine cause of smoke.”

Investigators said there was no evidence to suggest that a fire onboard a Boeing 787 Dreamliner parked at London Heathrow Airport was caused by the next-generation jet’s batteries.

A team from Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) was deployed following the blaze on Friday on an Ethiopian Airlines plane, which was empty at the time.

The fire is a further blow for the jet, after Boeing temporarily withdrew all Dreamliners from service earlier this year due to concerns that batteries on board could cause fires.

However, the latest incident was not down to the batteries, said the AAIB, an agency of Britain’s Department of Transport ministry.
Following Saturday’s first stage of its probe, the AAIB found there was “no evidence of a direct causal relationship” between the batteries and the incident at Heathrow.

“The aircraft is currently located in a hangar at London Heathrow,” the it added.

“There has been extensive heat damage in the upper portion of the rear fuselage, a complex part of the aircraft, and the initial investigation is likely to take several days,” it said.

“It is clear that this heat damage is remote from the area in which the aircraft main and APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) batteries are located and at this stage there is no evidence of a direct causal relationship.”
Television pictures showed burn marks on the top of the plane near the back, just in front of the vertical stabiliser.

The US Federal Aviation Administration said it had also sent an official to Britain to gather facts for its own regulatory body, the US National Transportation Safety Board.

A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines said it was investigating the incident but had no plans to ground its fleet of four 787 Dreamliners.

“Ethiopia’s Dreamliners will continue to fly,” Hailu Teklehaimanot told AFP in Addis Ababa.

“The incident at Heathrow is not being treated as flight-related as the incident happened after being grounded for eight hours.”
A global grounding order on the Dreamliner was issued in January after lithium-ion batteries overheated on two different jets, with one of them catching fire while the aircraft was parked.

The US aviation giant has since rolled out modifications it says will ensure the planes are safe.

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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