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On January 7, 2013, Japan Airlines’ station manager at Boston Logan International Airport was in his office monitoring radio chatter when he was informed of smoke inside the cabin of a parked JAL Boeing 787 that had recently arrived from Narita. The airliner was brand-new — it had been delivered less than three weeks earlier — and the station manager was perplexed. “So you mean [a] passenger smoked in the lavatory?” he asked.
As quickly became apparent, the problem was not a smoking passenger but a smoking lithium-ion battery for the aircraft’s auxiliary power unit. First responders would spend the next hour-and-a-half trying to control the fire and wrestle the battery box from the aft electronic equipment bay as it belched hot liquid and smoke. Just over a week later, on January 16, the crew of an All Nippon Airways 787 en route…
Batteries are a looming certification challenge for electric aviation hopefuls – TAC Research
