Boeing's Real Problem With the Dreamliner: Bean-Counter vs. Engineer

[jberryhill]

1. IMHO

The bean-counter/engineer conflict is a classic one, but I don't think this one is all that squarely attributable to one or the other.

The issue is not the outsourcing of the battery manufacturing per se, nor cost-cutting in the design.

Lithium battery thermal runaway issues are well known and require built-in countermeasures. I'm surprised that given the sheer number of laptops on airplanes, that one hasn't melted its way through the bottom of an airplane somewhere, but I suppose that is a testament to how well-controlled the issue is in even cheap laptops. There is an FAA restriction on quantities of spare lithium batteries that can be taken onboard (or at least there was the last time I checked), but it is rarely enforced by the TSA.

The battery in question has been alleged to violate design principles on density of cells. Now, sure, design rules are themselves driven by innovation, but if someone (a) pushes the edge of the envelope and (b) that system fails in a manner consistent with the reason for the envelope, then it is hard to argue the design was valid.