Boeing Shares Sink on Reports of Dreamliner Fire | Hacker News Reader

Boeing Shares Sink on Reports of Dreamliner Fire

blogs.wsj.com

41 pointsclarky0724 comments

Arrivals and departures suspended at Heathrow? How isn't this a complete overreaction?

EDIT: And why downvote someone asking a question? I learned something by asking this question.

Sounds like a standard operational procedure when there's an emergency. From the BBC article:

A Heathrow spokesman said: "Arrivals and departures were temporarily suspended while airport fire crews attended to this incident."

"This is a standard procedure if fire crews are occupied with an incident."

Sounds like the right move. You'd hate for a chain reaction to make things worse. Things could escalate VERY quickly, in a very bad way.

Makes perfect sense. If the emergency crews are attending to a situation somewhere else in the airport, there's now no emergency facilities available in the event of another emergency happening to another plane that's departing or landing. This poses a serious risk. It's safer to just stop operations and divert inbound flights to one of London's other airports, Gatwick being a prime candidate due to its distance and facilities.

> there's now no emergency facilities available in the event of another emergency happening

They only have the ability to deal with one emergency at a time? That strikes me as sub-optimal, especially if the "emergency" is contained within a single parked aircraft. Diversion is probably costing all the airlines involved a ton. I think it would be worthwhile for emergency facilities to have a backup.

I can deal with two servers being down at once at work, but I'd prefer to only have to deal with one. Same thing with airports, I'd imagine.

Yes, but you're not diverting traffic with one server down, "just in case," are you?

If a server goes down it might be an inconvenience and a bad day, but if a plane goes down it could be a fire and hundreds of deaths.

I'm not sure your analogy fits. The plane was already "down" and there was already a fire. However, it should have been apparent there was not to be hundreds of deaths.

I might avoid running an upgrade on the rest of my servers while I troubleshoot the broken one.

I'd imagine they'd send all their resources to any given emergency, no matter what size they think it is at the outset rather than be faced with a situation in which they've responded inadequately. This would mean that if there were another emergency on one of the active runways (burning plane with passengers, for example), they'd not be able to respond with their usual full force which could lead to deaths and bad PR. I can see in this situation they'd rather temporarily suspend operations than have a diminished emergency crew.

As for the cost, yes, but airlines are fairly risk adverse creatures and I'd imagine they'd have adequate insurance to cover such eventualities.

Why would you size for multiple incidents? One is rare enough, but you have to deal with it. Two guarantees a whole set of people and equipment that will never have a use.

Anyway, I suspect the real reason is that an emergency is a dynamic situation, and an airport is a large complex barely-controlled environment. Sure, probably parts of the airport could stay in use, but it would take a lot of coordination and analysis to do so safely, and there's really no time to do that. So you just shut it down.

You know what's going on now, so it's easy to say; but if you're running the airport and all you know is "aircraft on fire", what do you do?

The emergency services have to safely get to the incident, possibly using the extra entrances for that purpose.

Aircraft full of passengers landing at the same time as emergency vehicles trying to get to an incident of potentially unknown severity seems like a recipe for disaster.

Aviation is a shining example of how thought about risk, learning from failures/mistakes and evolving standard operating procedures can almost completely de-risk an inherently risky environment.

I came across this article after the incident in SFO earlier in the week:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777

No flight related deaths since it began service in 1995 - I've been thinking about that all week. That is some inspirational engineering.

> Arrivals and departures suspended at Heathrow? How isn't this a complete overreaction?

The runways and taxiways that planes would normally be using arriving and departing are being used, or may need to be used, without delay by emergency vehicles.

The simplest and safest way to assure that this can be done, and done safely, is to not have aircraft using them for landings, takeoffs, and taxiing.

> not have aircraft using them for landings, takeoffs, and taxiing.

Okay, that makes sense now: The regular infrastructure is needed for the emergency infrastructure. The analogy would be, that an admin could log in unless the site were taken down. That would be terrible for a website, but it makes sense for physical infrastructure.

The fire is probably not related to the battery as the main battery is located near the cockpit, with another in the middle of the plane. This fire seemed to have occurred near the tail.

PDF showing battery locations:

http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/airports/arff/ar...

I'm curious whether if the fire is again battery related whether Elon Musk will reiterate his offer to help with the battery technology. Tony Stark (who in the movie version is partly based on Elon) surely would...

Why even bother flying? Let's just give everyone suits :)

Is it related to battery again? How did they fix it the last time? I can hear Elon Musk murmurs, "I told you so."

I wonder if you get a referral fee or some ad money from mentioning name in conjunction with lithium. Or does he appear when you say it three times.

Elon musk Elon musk

Just to be sure, I went back into my comment history to check. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I mentioned his name or something related to lithium. I have pretty much avoided the Tesla/Elon/Lithium discussion until this point. I don't know where you got that idea about me.

A spot check on stock price is the absolute least interesting aspect of this story.

I don't even know why WSJ continues to print these kinds of stories...it's not like it is hard to keep track of Boeing's stock price.

Presumably because people read them. It has certainly been upvoted a ton here, so I have to assume there is interest.

eh I don't know. I'm the OP, and the price of Boeing's stock (at least spot price) had nothing to do with my reason for submitting it. Fire on the 787 and potential future implications were why I thought it was interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com