Latest Dreamliner Hiccup: Toilets Won't Flush

Yet another set of problems has emerged for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, forcing two Japan Airlines flights to turn around just days after the airline announced a switch to Airbus. On a flight from San Diego to Tokyo, one of two anti-ice systems stopped working, the BBC reports, sending the plane back within hours, NBC 7 notes. And on a flight from Moscow, the toilets wouldn't flush "and the device to heat meals also had a problem," a JAL spokesman tells AFP.

He said the problem was electrical, though unrelated to the plane's much-maligned batteries. The second plane returned five hours after takeoff, the Guardian reports. In further bad news, Norwegian Air Shuttle is set to ground a second Dreamliner as a precaution; the budget airline's first 787 had a series of electrical and hydraulic problems, Reuters reports. The jet has "got to improve: it can't keep doing what it has been doing and it has been very frustrating," says a leading Boeing customer, who rents the planes to Norwegian Air Shuttle. (More Boeing stories.)