Dreamliner probe widens after excess battery voltage ruled out

Japan Airlines Co (JAL) and said they were expanding the probe to look at the battery’s charger and the jet’s auxiliary power unit.
Last week, governments across the world grounded the Dreamliner while Boeing halted deliveries after a problem with a lithium-ion battery on a second 787 plane, flown by All Nippon Airways Co (ANA), forced the aircraft to make an emergency landing in western Japan. A growing number of investigators and Boeing executives are working around the clock to determine what caused the two incidents which the US Federal Aviation Administration says released flammable chemicals and could have sparked a fire in the plane’s electrical compartment. There are still no clear answers about the root cause of the battery failures, but the US National Transportation Safety Board’s statement eliminated one possible answer that had been raised by Japanese investigators.
It also underscored the complexity of investigating a battery system that includes manufacturers across the world, and may point to a design problem with the battery that could take longer to fix than swapping out a faulty batch of batteries. “Examination of the flight recorder data from the JAL B-787 airplane indicates that the APU (auxiliary power unit) battery did not exceed its designed voltage of 32 volts,” the NTSB said in a statement issued early Sunday. On Friday, a Japanese safety official had told reporters that excessive electricity may have overheated the battery in the ANA-owned Dreamliner that was forced to make the emergency landing at Japan’s Takamatsu airport last week. “The NTSB wanted to set the record straight,” said one source familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly. US investigators have already examined the lithium-ion battery that powered the APU, where the battery fire started in the JAL plane, as well as several other components removed from the airplane, including wire bundles and battery management circuit boards, the NTSB statement said.
On Tuesday, investigators will convene in Tucson, Arizona to test and examine the charger for the battery, and download non-volatile memory from the APU controller, with similar tests planned at the Phoenix facility where the APUs are built. Other components have been sent for download or examination to Boeing’s Seattle facility and manufacturer facilities in Japan.Securaplane Technologies Inc, a unit of Britain’s Meggitt Plc that makes the charger, said it will fully support the US investigation.