Elon Musk offers to help get the grounded Boeing 787 Dreamliner back in the air

A Twitter message is a publicity stunt, not a sincere offer for help. I'm sure Elon knows the right people to contact at Boeing directly if he really wants to work something out.

This is about more than who has better engineers or a publicity stunt. This is damage control.<p>Right now lithium is under heavy fire (no pun intended) both because its expensive and explosive (besides this, many Fisker Karma cars burned).<p>Since Tesla is still losing money and has to raise money by selling stock, Musk has to keep up appearances by showing Tesla has the know-how to make lithium safe.<p>Or else, Tesla will run out of money soon, and game over.

<a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/dreamliner-batteries-and-tesla-batteries" rel="nofollow">http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/dreamliner-batteries...</a> implies that Tesla battery packs do a better job of containing thermal runaway than many other battery pack designs; it may be that simply replacing the Dreamliner's current batteries with a design very similar to what Tesla uses in their cars would address the Dreamliner problems.<p>Elon has been trading jabs in the press with United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin) over US military satellite launch, with Elon claiming he can provide better pricing because SpaceX has more advanced technology; perhaps there are multiple places Elon has more advanced technology than Boeing.<p>The other possibility is that Boeing may revert to using a non-lithium ion battery technology. I haven't found any description of how much work they'd need to do to make that happen.

Pretty clever PR move by Elon Musk. Now, if Boeing accept the offer, they give the impression that Musk has better engineers. If they reject it, they look arrogant and ungrateful.

It's amazing how geeks continually fall for Musk's simple propaganda. If you want to believe, you believe.

Musk isn't some random dude. Between SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, he probably knows a thing or two about putting large things in the air and electric batteries.<p>He's also said he would ultimately like to make electric airplanes, so this is probably not the first day he's thought about it.

I suspect the most useful help would be helping the FAA come to grips with lithium ion safety issues. Confronted with concerns about a novel technology the FAA is going to have a hard time deciding how to sign off on safety.<p>I'm sure Musk's people have all sorts of checklists and criteria to be satisfied for large lithium ion batteries in vehicular use. The FAA can then apply those to Boeing's work.

Since Boeing is a huge asset to the US, in image projection and jobs and prestige. This should be something that the US take seriously and throw whatever it takes at it to solve the problem. The airliner being a success is strategic to the US

I highly doubt if Boeing would be interested, considering Elon and his band of engineers at Space X are competitors to Boeing's rocket business. It is amazing to see how both Boeing and Elon are pushing the envelope on the development of battery technology.

What's in it for him?

The batteries used in the Tesla and the 787 are completely different.<p>And the ones on the 787 are made in Japan so I am sure the quality is extremely high, there is just an engineering problem they didn't anticipate or maybe they outsourced a component that failed.

How Boeing responds to this will show us how the company management is willing to adapt.

Boeing has issued a response:<p>“Space transport guys are not going to just walk in and figure this out."

Not sure I like this move, seems very opportunistic. If Elon has any concrete tips he knows how to give them for free, or even sell to Boeing. Taking to twitter seems cheesy. Imagine Google doing it to Amazon when AWS goes down.<p>Things happen even to the brightest so Elon and others should keep that in mind.

With sufficient thrust Boings fly just fine ...<p>(RFC 1925)