The Chilean airline LAN will resume flights out of L.A. on June 1, while United's service from LAX to Tokyo and Shanghai is slated for the first week of August. Despite the FAA signing off on Boeing's battery fix to its 787 Dreamliner, the airlines face a PR puzzle in convincing passengers that the cutting-edge jet is safe to fly - despite engineers being unable to identify the cause of battery fires that kept the plane grounded for three months. Grounding the plane has already cost Boeing around $600 million. From the NYT:
It is in Japan where the 787 has a particularly difficult task in winning back confidence. The Japanese public has been subject to intense coverage of what first appeared to be teething problems of Boeing's next-generation 787 jet: a cracked cockpit window and a fuel leak. Then a battery fire on a parked Japan Airlines jet in Boston in January, followed closely by a meltdown of batteries aboard a domestic All Nippon flight, catapulted the story into the nation's top headlines. The All Nippon incident, which prompted an emergency landing, has been particularly damaging to the 787's image in Japan. All day, TV stations played footage of the incident, emergency chutes splayed on the tarmac, with testimony from distressed passengers to boot. "I was terrified. I didn't feel alive," Masaaki Ishikawa, a 40-year-old office worker, told the Sankei newspaper at the time.