Operations at the Heathrow Airport in London were temporarily halted after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane parked at the airport caught fire.
Officials from the Heathrow airport are still investigating the incident. Luckily, the plane was still unoccupied when the plane caught fire, but the incident shut down both runways, leading to air traffic in what is considered as one of the busiest airports in the world.
Initial investigations showed no signs that the incident is related to the Dreamliner's lithium-ion batteries. Earlier this year, almost fifty 787 Dreamliner were grounded after two 787's caught fire due to battery malfunctions.
The incident forced the company to implement a costly redesigning of the new flagship aircraft. Boeing redesigned the jets and changed the batteries, leading to the resume of operations last April.
The Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB) in the U.K. released a statement on their official website shortly after the incident, saying that they already fielded a team including representatives from the various organizations involved such as the National Transportation Safety Board (USA) and the Civil Aviation Authority of Ethiopia to conduct technical investigations and reiterated that initial reports from the team found no evidence linking the incident to battery problems.
"There has been extensive heat damage in the upper portion of the rear fuselage, a complex part of the aircraft, and the initial investigation is likely to take several days. However, it is clear that this heat damage is remote from the area in which the aircraft main and APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) batteries are located, and, at this stage, there is no evidence of a direct causal relationship," the press release read.
Although investigations are still ongoing, Heathrow announced that operations resumed 90 minutes after the incident, which greatly affected the shares of the Boeing.
The stocks of the company stumbled as much as seven percent after the incident. This came after Boeing reached a 52-week high on Friday.
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