Elon Musk may be right about his simple solution for Boeing
qz.com
qz.com
And now the title says "Why Obama's pick for Secretary of the Interior is a shrewd move" while Elton Musk's story is still up there.
Some web developer or designer over there is being too clever by half. Keep the damned thing simple.
Please, let's keep to a minimum of not breaking my back button.
Now, Boeing appears to have reconsidered. Though it is not saying so explicitly, it seems to be looking at Musk’s main advice—reducing the chance of fire hazard by increasing the space (paywall) between the lithium-ion cells in the battery pack, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A Musk fan site is crowing about Boeing’s possible about-face.
The reporting on Musk gets one thing wrong—his Tesla automobiles do not use the lithium-cobalt-oxide chemistry that is in the Dreamliner batteries. They rely on Panasonic nickel-cobalt-aluminum lithium-ion batteries, which may be less volatile.
In the end, that may not be a crucial difference, one battery scientist told me—“I would be the first to say that there are safer battery chemistries available than [Boeing's lithium-cobalt-oxide],” he said, “but if you know what you’re dealing with, you can make a system safe.”
Yet it may be at least partly about perception. Why choose the most volatile of all the standard lithium-ion configurations when, in a crisis, that could turn into a public relations nightmare?
Generally speaking, battery scientists will speak only not-for-attribution on the 787 issue. In some cases this is because they have been hired by Boeing as consultants to figure out what went wrong. The one quoted above doesn’t want to be identified.
But he also thinks that, contrary to what some reports have suggested, Boeing has made progress in figuring out the root cause of the problem with the Dreamliners. “The process of elimination does rule out many possible root causes and gets you closer to the answer,” the scientist said. “I’m sure they have a short list that’s getting shorter by the day.”
You can read it there without the awful UI decisions of the original site. (Some Firefox and some chrome are unable to use it.)
tl;dr/cr: Elon Musk called Boeing to say "I've got an idea". Boeing said "Our guys are on it, so thanks, but no thanks". A couple of weeks later they called him back. "Hey, about that idea..."
That's not what the story seems to say though.
It sounds like Boeing may have reached conclusions through their investigation that resemble what Musk said.
The "Musk fan site" is naturally interpreting this as "Musk's idea," but it's not at all clear Musk had anything to do with it. If there's a reasonable and natural solution to a problem, it's not all surprising when independent teams discover it.