LONDON (AP) — A fire on an empty Boeing 787 plane at London's Heathrow Airport didn't appear to be caused by faulty aircraft batteries, a British investigative agency said Saturday.
Investors in Boeing, which calls its newest plane a Dreamliner, had feared that Friday's blaze meant that a battery overheating problem that grounded the whole fleet of such planes in January had not been fixed. News of the fire on the Ethiopian Airlines plane sent Boeing shares down 4.7 percent on Friday.
But Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch said there was "no evidence of a direct causal relationship" between the Dreamliner's batteries and the fire.
"There has been extensive heat damage in the upper portion of the rear fuselage, a complex part of the aircraft ... 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," the agency said in a statement.