Authorities pinpoint cause of 787 battery fire

The aircraft was on the ground in Boston on January 7, 2013 when the auxiliary power unit battery (APU) of a JAL 787 experienced severe fire damage.

This and other incidents led the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to issue an emergency airworthiness directive that required airlines to temporarily cease flights of the 787 whilst battery failures were investigated.

‘US airlines carry about two million people through the skies safely every day, which has been achieved in large part through design redundancy and layers of defence,’ said NTSB chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman. ‘Our task now is to see if enough - and appropriate - layers of defense and adequate checks were built into the design, certification and manufacturing of this battery.’

After an examination of the JAL lithium-ion battery, which was comprised of eight individual cells, investigators determined that the majority of evidence from the flight data recorder and both thermal and mechanical damage pointed to an initiating event in a single cell.