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Japan's ANA Puts Its 787 Dreamliners Back In Service

All Nippon Airways' Boeing 787 Dreamliner takes off from Chitose airport in Hokkaido, northern Japan, for Tokyo's Haneda airport on Sunday.
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All Nippon Airways' Boeing 787 Dreamliner takes off from Chitose airport in Hokkaido, northern Japan, for Tokyo's Haneda airport on Sunday.

Japan's All Nippon Airways put its fleet of Boeing 787s back in service Sunday. If you remember, the Dreamliners were grounded for four months after two separate airplanes had issues with their batteries overheating.

The BBC reports that the first Dreamliner flight landed at Tokyo's Haneda airport after a short flight from Sapporo today. The BBC adds:

"Other airlines have already resumed 787 flights, but ANA is Boeing's biggest Dreamliner customer, with 17 planes. Sunday's Dreamliner flight was the first of five scheduled by ANA in May, before the airline restarts a full commercial schedule on 1 June.

"It ran its first test flights in late April.

"ANA operates more than a third of all Dreamliners currently in service, and has another 36 on order."

As USA Today reports, after the battery accidents Boeing "redesigned the battery in a way that makes fires less likely and easier to control if they do happen" and the "Federal Aviation Administration approved the plan in April."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eyder Peralta is NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.