ANA scraps 787 Dreamliner flight after engine fails to start

Tokyo:ANA Holdings Inc., operator of the world’s biggest fleet of Boeing Co. 787s, scrapped a service with the Dreamliner on Wednesday, the third cancellation for the aircraft in Japan this week after a four-month grounding.

add_main_imageANA couldn’t use the 787 for the flight from Ube, western Japan, to Tokyo’s Haneda airport as the right engine failed to start, said Megumi Tezuka, a spokeswoman at the company. The airline is looking into the cause and said it was separate from the battery issues that had plagued the Dreamliner earlier.

Japan Airlines Co., the world’s second-largest Dreamliner operator, also canceled a service with the 787 on Tuesday after an indicator on a flight bound for Singapore showed problem with the engine anti-icing system. ANA and Japan Air both restarted flights with the plane 1 June after battery malfunctions kept their Dreamliner fleet grounded for more than four months.NextMAds

On 10 June, ANA scrapped a 787 flight to Tokyo from Fukuoka after a sensor next to an engine indicated a possible problem.

ANA had a reliability of 98.9% on domestic flights in April, Tezuka said. That means 1.1% of the airline’s 812 domestic flights were cancelled for reasons ranging from weather delays to maintenance, or roughly eight to nine a day, she said.

The carriers, which have a total of 27 Dreamliners, are flying the fuel-efficient aircraft to cities such as Boston and San Jose, California, that wouldn’t be profitable with larger planes. The four-month suspension of 787 services would affect sales this year, ANA and JAL have said, after melting batteries on two jets spurred regulators to park all the planes in January.

Biggest market

Japan has been the biggest market so far for Boeing’s plane, the first jetliner made chiefly of composite plastic materials. That meant ANA and JAL had the broadest disruptions while the aircraft were grounded and Boeing was rushing to find a fix for the lithium-ion batteries.

Among the eight Dreamliner operators whose fleet were grounded by the battery problems, Ethiopian Airlines Enterprise began flying again in April while Qatar Airways Ltd, Air India Ltd and United Continental Holdings Inc resumed service last month.sixthMAds

One of ANA’s 787s made an emergency landing on 16 January after smoke from a lithium-ion battery was detected. Nine days earlier, a battery had caught fire on a JAL 787 in Boston. No one was injured in either incident.

The US Federal Aviation Administration ordered 787s in domestic service grounded, the first such action for an entire model since 1979, and regulators around the world followed suit. The Dreamliner is the only large commercial jet equipped with lithium-ion batteries as part of its power system.

The groundings may have reduced ANA sales by about ¥16 billion ($166 million), according to figures from the company. JAL’s probably lost ¥6.5 billion in sales due to the groundings, it has said.

Boeing redesigned the battery to include more protection around individual cells to contain any overheating, added a steel case to prevent fire and a tube that would vent any fumes outside the fuselage. Carriers began 787 test flights after the FAA approved the battery upgrades.