My Take on the 787 Dreamliner Grounding Situation:

As anyone who watches any news or reads any online aviation media would be aware, which if you’ve ended up on this blog you probably fall into the latter category, earlier this week a 787 operated by Japan’s ANA made an emergency landing in Takamatsu. I’m not sure if I can pronounce that correctly but at least I tried, unlike most western media who just reported in landed in Western Japan. The “facts” of the incident have been covered in depth by many respectable and not so respectable media outlets, however I thought I’d launch my latest blog article type InNews, with my take on the current 787 situation.

You’ve all seen them already, but I found the evacuation videos that appeared online and in the media to show a very calm and orderly evacuation, with quite a lot of smartphones filming the whole thing. To me it all seemed a little too calm; I’ve seen people in more of a hurry to get off a normal flight than this evacuation.

Thus it seems that there wasn’t much panic on board, which you don’t want in an emergency, so well done to the crew for such a calm evacuation. Given how calm it all looked, I guess the sceptic in me wonders if they should have done a full evacuation, instead perhaps maybe have called for some stairs first, then if things went to shit, do a full evacuation. In comparison, after the QF32 A380 incident over Singapore, the passengers were kept on the plane for quite a while, over an hour I believe, despite an engine that couldn’t be shut down and large fuel leaks.

Those passengers were eventually all deplaned via stairs, in what appeared to be a much more dramatic situation. If you read the book on that incident, the thought process of the captain regarding the risk of evacuating the A380 versus the risk of taking a wait and see approach are explained quite well.  Of course its easy to make these calls while sitting safely behind a computer watching the event play out on YouTube, I’m sure sitting in the cockpit with presumably fire alarms sounding, my decision making process may have been less optimistic. I’m not trying to second guess the safety of those on that plane, or make it out to be a very minor incident after all fire on a plane is unpredictable and rarely ends well if out of control.

Anyway, back to why the 787’s got to be where they are now. From what I can tell, Japan, or just ANA and Japan Airlines, pretty much immediately grounded all 787’s which lets face it, most of the world’s 787 fleet are with either ANA or Japan airlines anyway, so that action took out most of the world’s fledgling 787 fleet.  So later on the FAA grounded all 787’s registered in the US, which is just the United fleet (all 6 of them). Most other airlines or aviation authorities followed the FAA, which is generally the way it works, and the remainder of the world fleet are now sitting around on the ground while Boeing scrambles to work out what’s going wrong, and what they can to do prove to the FAA, and world aviation community that these birds are safe to be flying again.

I’m no engineer or aviation expert, just a humble lounge chair enthusiast, but to me the main issues with the 787 are the Lithium Ion batteries catching fire, and then throw in a few fuel leaks, which I guess when things are catching fire isn’t that great and a few software issues with the brakes have pushed the regulators to rethink the 787, and sort these issues out on the ground. These are issues indeed, which need to be fixed, but who hasn’t been delayed at an airport somewhere before because their aircraft has gone unserviceable, or who hasn’t had a recall notice of some kind on their new car.

The fact is, that new things, be them airplanes, cars, computers or your phone, have issues when they first launch – that’s how innovation works – you build something, you test the crap out of it, but even after you cover off 99.9% of all bugs, once the consumer gets their hands on it, stuff is going to go wrong, and you need to fix it. The only luxury we have with most goods, is that failure generally happens on the ground and not at 35,000 feet, making it a tad safer to identify and fix – however on the same note, there have been quite a few car’s recalled completely as well after a few have been involved in serious or fatal accidents.

Most mainstream media reports seem rather fixated on the plane being built mainly from composites, rather than metal, yet these issues that have caused the grounding don’t really seem to stem from the structure of the aircraft – just some components of them, mainly the battery. The fact is that when something goes wrong with a new airplane the general population and media love it! It’s a high profile story that sells newspapers and increases TV ratings, making it easier to sell advertising space on those channels. It happened with the A380, 777, A330 and probably the 747 and even earlier the 707, it’s just that the further you go back, the less instant the media was, yet I’m sure they still sold hard copy papers with stories about any issues that came up.

Will the 787 be flying again soon? You bet. Too many people have spent too much money for this to be a permanent problem. Will this happen again when Airbus launches the A350? Probably. Although airlines are trying new things, making planes lighter, more efficient and even more computerised, they are also making them safer. From what I’ve read online, systems have detected these issues, and alerted the crew to them, before they’ve become much bigger issues.

It wasn’t that long ago that you could freely smoke in an airplane. Nowadays smoke detectors detect the person trying to sneak a smoke in the bathroom, before the butt has a chance to start a fire in the waste bin. The point I’m trying to make here, is that yes, it appears there are more issues being discovered with each new aircraft that gets developed, but these issues, generally, have been detected earlier than they would have previously been, and thus been able to be fixed before they become major disasters.

If the 787 were cleared to fly again tomorrow, would I go on it?  I’ve wanted to try out the electronic window dimming for a while now anyway, but even that aside, I would. Why? There are risks involved in everything in life, most of which aren’t regulated to the same degree that aviation is. Thus, if something is going to cause me injury, statistically speaking, its less likely to happen on a cleared 787 – especially with all the attention its getting at the moment. Thus I guess I’m a numbers guy, and the way I add up those numbers, its still safer to jump on a 787, than it is to do many activities we do every day without thinking twice, as Melbourne Metro’ humorously list in their “dumb ways to die” video, of which flying on a 787 isn’t listed.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this first article in the new “InNews” section of CarlousMoochous.com . I’m not going to make the mistake of committing to writing one of these on a scheduled basis, as I’m likely to run out of time and not get to it. Instead, when stories that interest me in the Travel or Aviation sectors pop up, I’ll add an article on here. To finish up, what do you think of my take on the 787 grounding? Would you fly on one? What’s your take? Leave a comment below and follow @carlousmoochous on twitter for the latest posts on this site.

Note: The Feature Image is a compilation of screenshots from various media outlets news stories. Unfortunately I live way too far away from any 787 to take my own photo this time. Thus, no ownership is claimed, if you want your image removed please let me know.