[Yossarian]

Not good for the 787 program. They're supposed to start making commercial deliveries early next year!

At least nobody was hurt, but I'd hate to be Boeing right now.

[DennisR]

Well, let’s see what the problem was and then decide. The 787 will be in huge demand for years to come.

[Flavius]

well now they know their emergency systems work great

[freedumb2003]

>>At least nobody was hurt, but I’d hate to be Boeing right now.<<

Not too great to be Airbus either.

Maybe both companies’ respective reach exceeded their grasp.

[Da Coyote]

This was a highly instrumented test plane. Bet the problem was with the instrumentation. One of the early test flights of the B-1had much the same problem back around ‘75 and had to make an emergency landing with partial flight control problems.

[Revel]

They can’t even make through the test phase. Fly by cable was safer than this monstrosity.

[Not A Snowbird]

Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Bet the pucker factor in the cockpit was fairly high.

[ASOC]

Planes I'll fly on

0-2
737 - all series
747 - all series
DC 9 and variants
787 'Dreamliner'
any Airbusted

At my age, I have come to hate flying - for so many reasons, the least of which is the TSA.....

[Drago]

Hummmm...I wonder if the fire originated in the special flight test equipment, or in “normal” 787 systems??

[John Leland 1789]

I suspect that this will be a great plane anyway.

One of the greatest documentaries I've ever seen was made after there was a lot of negative speculation about the landing gear breaks of the 777.

It was a documentary, not a suspense movie, but it was a great watch, as they landed the 777 at Boeing Field, if I remember correctly, and stopped the plane using ONLY the landing gear breaks (deliberately) -— no reverse thrust from the engines.

Of course, this destroyed the entire landing gear, but it was done on purpose to give the maximum exam to the breaks.

Once stopped, fireman stood there at the landing gear and were told not to foam them down until they actually caught fire. This was also a deliberate part of the test, to see how much heat actually developed in the landing gear in this process.

I remember then the tires finally igniting, and then they turned the foam on them and cooled the whole thing off. But it actually took several minutes before there was any flame.

I'd like to see that again — it's probably on line somewhere. The engineering of the 777 landing gear breaks was vindicated in the test.

[oldvike]

Must have union labor putting the dang things together.

[kittycatonline.com]

Electrical fire forces emergency landing of 787 test plane

That's why it's a test plane. That's where you want this sort of thing to occur at.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Well, looks like it failed THAT test.

[Yo-Yo]

From the Leeham News and Commentary website:

There are plenty of news stories accessible through Google, so we won’t recap the incident here.

Here’s what we can add to the story at this time (06:30 AM PST, Nov. 10); we’ll update as needed.

• We’ve been told by a person familiar with the details of the incident that the fire in the aft electronic bay cause a lot of damage to the surrounding composite structure. The bay is located next to the wing box.
• Flightblogger and The Seattle Times reported that the flight instruments failed and the Ram Air Turbine deployed; in a statement released by Boeing about midnight Seattle time Tuesday, Boeing denied that the instruments failed but did not address whether the RAT deployed.
• Our source told us early Tuesday evening that there was a “cascading” series of electronic failures that redundancies failed to prevent. This is not necessarily inconsistent with Boeing’s midnight statement. These cascading failures, we were told, caused Boeing to ground the rest of the test fleet until Boeing has an understanding of the event. An hour and a half later, Flightblogger reported the test fleet had been grounded; Boeing has yet to confirm this.
• In our role as aviation consultant to KIRO TV (CBS, Seattle), we predicted Tuesday during the early evening newscasts that the incident will be serious enough to cause a delay in the flight test program and most likely a new delay in first delivery, because the investigation into the cause of the first–even if it identifies the cause fairly quickly–may take long enough to effect a fix to induce new delays.
• Dominic Gates in The Seattle Times, citing an unidentified source, said one possible cause could be an overheated electronics box that would be identified and replaced quickly. This may or may not be correct, but even if is, this may not be the end of it. Cooling the electronic bays was an early and persistent problem because of the heat generated by the all-electric airplane and cooling the bays was one of those vexing problems during the development of the airplane. If cooling proves to be insufficient and a contributor to the cause of the fire, who knows what redesign might be required. It is important to emphasis here that the unidentified source in Gates’ story is speculating and so are we.

[Yo-Yo]

From the Leeham News and Commentary website:

There are plenty of news stories accessible through Google, so we won’t recap the incident here.

Here’s what we can add to the story at this time (06:30 AM PST, Nov. 10); we’ll update as needed.

• We’ve been told by a person familiar with the details of the incident that the fire in the aft electronic bay cause a lot of damage to the surrounding composite structure. The bay is located next to the wing box.
• Flightblogger and The Seattle Times reported that the flight instruments failed and the Ram Air Turbine deployed; in a statement released by Boeing about midnight Seattle time Tuesday, Boeing denied that the instruments failed but did not address whether the RAT deployed.
• Our source told us early Tuesday evening that there was a “cascading” series of electronic failures that redundancies failed to prevent. This is not necessarily inconsistent with Boeing’s midnight statement. These cascading failures, we were told, caused Boeing to ground the rest of the test fleet until Boeing has an understanding of the event. An hour and a half later, Flightblogger reported the test fleet had been grounded; Boeing has yet to confirm this.
• In our role as aviation consultant to KIRO TV (CBS, Seattle), we predicted Tuesday during the early evening newscasts that the incident will be serious enough to cause a delay in the flight test program and most likely a new delay in first delivery, because the investigation into the cause of the first–even if it identifies the cause fairly quickly–may take long enough to effect a fix to induce new delays.
• Dominic Gates in The Seattle Times, citing an unidentified source, said one possible cause could be an overheated electronics box that would be identified and replaced quickly. This may or may not be correct, but even if is, this may not be the end of it. Cooling the electronic bays was an early and persistent problem because of the heat generated by the all-electric airplane and cooling the bays was one of those vexing problems during the development of the airplane. If cooling proves to be insufficient and a contributor to the cause of the fire, who knows what redesign might be required. It is important to emphasis here that the unidentified source in Gates’ story is speculating and so are we.

[upcountryhorseman]

I'm worried about the new material used on wings and fuselage. They say it spalls off where holes occur.

[Perdogg]

Gee, I wonder where all the “if it ain’t Boeing” crowd are now?