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Yeah, all kettles in the UK which start in price from about £8 have a bimetallic strip based device to disconnect the power if the thing tries overheating because it's got no water in or such like. You'd think something like that would not be so hard or expensive to do.

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Place that kettle on top of a blast furnace and see how easy it is. Remember we’re talking about something attached to an operating jet engine.

Edit: Also depending on altitude ambient temperature can vary over a range of several hundred degrees - it gets really really cold at 40,000ft.

To be fair on both your point and the parent comment, it is both a difficult problem, and one that engineers at Boeing are capable of solving (and likely already solved). The issue here isn't an engineering one, it's a management one.

Looking it up the heating system uses bleed air from the engine so probably isn't as easy to control. On the other hand it just has to stop the thing getting hot enough to damage carbon composite which probably isn't anything extreme temperature wise. If you limited it to say 80C it would probably be ok to stop ice and also not fry the composite.

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