The BBC reports that London's Heathrow Airport is closed after a fire broke out aboard a parked Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner. No injuries were reported, and apparently no one was aboard the plane when the fire started while parked away from the airport's gates. "The aircraft was parked on a remote parking stand," a Heathrow spokesperson told the BBC.
Update: Video coverage of the fire shows fire damage in the aft end of the aircraft, near the old ocation of the battery compartment that powers the Auxiliary Power Units, used to start the engines. The batteries are now located just behind the wings. And in a separate incident today, a Thompson Airways 787 flying from Manchester, England to Florida returned to Manchester because of an unspecified "technical issue."
The fire comes just under three months after the Federal Aviation Administration approved fixes implemented by Boeing to the lithium-ion batteries used aboard the 787 and lifted the grounding order on the aircraft. Ironically, the plane that caught fire at Heathrow today was the same plane that made the first commercial 787 flight after the fixes were implemented.
So far, the cause of the fire is "unexplained," according to London's Metropolitan Police. But the fire aboard a Japan Air Lines 787 in Boston that precipitated the three-month grounding of the 787 fleet occurred under similar circumstances while the plane was unattended after a long flight. The cause of that fire was thermal runaway, a catastrophic overheating of the battery's cells caused by multiple short-circuits in a single cell of the plane's battery.
The redesigned battery system added insulation around battery cells to lower the likelihood of short-circuits between cells. It also put the battery in a fire-proof, explosion-resistant box that is supposed to contain any battery failure and prevent the spread of a fire.