A Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner test flight with top Boeing and All Nippon Airways (ANA) chiefs aboard landed at Tokyo International Airport yesterday, three months after the global fleet of 787s was grounded, as airlines seek to reassure passengers the planes are safe.
The test flight by ANA, one of the largest customers of the Boeing 787 Dreamliners, came a day after Ethiopian Airlines became the first carrier to resume flying the 787s that have been grounded worldwide since January due to battery problems.
ANA chairman Shinichiro Ito and Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief executive Ray Conner descended the stairs of the Dreamliner, which landed at the airport at about 11am after a two-hour test flight.
Photo: Reuters
“After three months, it’s a terrific feeling to have ANA 787 back in the air and I am very pleased to say that it was a perfect flight on a perfect day,” Conner said at a news conference. “As evident by the fact that we are here today, we are very confident in the solution that we developed ... and I can tell you that we [would] put our family on this airplane on any day of a week and any time.”
ANA has the world’s largest fleet of the next-generation planes and the presence of both executives on the test flight underscored their desire to put the damaging crisis behind them.
However, it could still be at least a month before the Japanese carrier can complete all the battery fixes and get its planes in the air.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other regulators grounded the worldwide Dreamliner fleet in mid-January after failures of the lithium-ion batteries on the jetliner caused a fire on board one parked plane at a Boston airport and forced the emergency landing of an ANA-operated aircraft in Japan.
Following months of investigations, the FAA on Thursday issued formal approval of Boeing’s battery fix, with Ethiopian Airlines on Saturday becoming the first carrier to resume using the aircraft in a flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Nairobi, Kenya.
Speaking in Tokyo on Saturday, Mike Sinnett, Boeing’s chief project manager for the Dreamliner program, said the Japanese test flight showed the faith that the US aircraft manufacturer had in the battery fix.
“What it represents is ... the depth of confidence that Ray Conner has in the series of design solutions we have brought forward,” Sinnett told reporters.
Although the exact cause of the battery failures has yet to be pinpointed — as emphasized by the FAA on Thursday — Sinnett insisted that the refitted planes were safe to fly.
“Even if we missed the root cause, we have identified 80 potential causal factors and we have addressed all of them in the design,” he said.
The battery solution eliminated the potential for fire and heat to get into the airplane, he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day