There was a fresh crisis yesterday, after All Nippon Airways (ANA) joined its fellow Japanese airline Japan Airline in grounding its fleet of Dreamliners so it could carry out safety checks.
It was a precautionary move from ANA, after one of its jets was forced into an emergency landing and evacuation outside Tokyo on Wednesday, following a battery fault warning, smoke in the cockpit, and the smell of smoke in the cabin.
It was the second battery-related problem to emerge this month, after Japan Airlines reported one of its Dreamliner’s batteries caught fire in Boston last week.
Wasn’t it Sony produced batteries that had the problem (for Sony themselves, fairly spectacularly, and Dell and to a lesser extent for Apple because of the aluminium cladding they used.)
Lithium-ion batteries are vulnerable to thermal runaway, whoever makes them.