ANA/Boeing 787 battery fires and grounding
Lithium-ion battery fires on two Boeing 787s (one in Boston, one an emergency landing in Japan) led aviation regulators to ground the entire 787 fleet worldwide for over three months.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
Lithium-ion battery fires on two Boeing 787s (one in Boston, one an emergency landing in Japan) led aviation regulators to ground the entire 787 fleet worldwide for over three months.
What the software actually got wrong
Investigators found the battery's monitoring and protection circuitry did not reliably detect or contain an internal short circuit in one cell before it triggered thermal runaway that spread to neighboring cells, a design and testing gap in the battery management system that Boeing had to redesign before the fleet could fly again.
Investigators found the battery's monitoring and protection circuitry did...
Investigators found the battery's monitoring and protection circuitry did not reliably detect or contain an internal short circuit in one cell before it triggered thermal runaway that spread to neighboring cells, a design and testing gap in the battery management system that Boeing had to redesign before the fleet could fly again.
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
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