- Two minor problems add to Dreamliner's week of woes
- A cracked cockpit window and an oil leak turned up in Japan on Friday
- It's normal for new aircraft to have problems in their first year of flight, experts say
- The Airbus A380 and the Boeing 747 went through growing pains when they were introduced
(CNN) -- A fire Monday, a fuel leak Tuesday, followed by two dings Friday.
It's been a rough week for the state-of-the-art Boeing 787 Dreamliner. And although it all sounds scary, aviation experts say these are normal growing pains for the new aircraft series, which debuted in 2011.
All four incidents occurred on planes operated by airlines based in Japan.
Oil was discovered leaking Friday from a generator on a Dreamliner engine at an airport in southern Japan, and a crack appeared in a cockpit window of a plane en route from Tokyo to a city in western Japan, a spokeswoman for All Nippon Airways said.
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On Tuesday, a Japan Airlines flight bound for Tokyo aborted takeoff from Boston's Logan International Airport after a pilot on another airplane spotted the 787 leaking fuel. On Monday, a maintenance worker discovered an electrical fire aboard an empty Japan Airlines 787 scheduled for departure from Logan.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating Monday's fire with Boeing's cooperation.
In December, a United Airlines 787 traveling from Houston to Newark, New Jersey, was diverted to New Orleans because of mechanical problems. A general inspection of all 787s in September turned up cracked engines on two planes.
Despite the flurry of reports, aviation experts say most new commercial airplanes do encounter problems after their launch.
Every new airplane is going to have these kinds of "teething problems," said John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member and former airline mechanic. The manufacturers usually "get a handle on it quickly and fix it," he said.
The cracked window and the leaky generator were not unusual issues, ANA said, and occur with other aircraft as well. This was the third time that a window cracked on an ANA Dreamliner, but the cockpit window has five layers, and Friday's crack, in a spider web pattern, appeared in the outer layer, ANA said. It did not endanger the flight.
Newer airplanes are safer than ever, Goglia said. "We are flying more airplanes that have been engineered to be safer," he said. "We almost (never) have material failures in airplanes anymore."
The Airbus A380 also had problems when it started flying in 2007, but aviation expert Janet Bednarek loves to fly on it.
"It had cracks in the wing, which would be much more concerning to me" than the 787 reports, said Bednarek, a University of Dayton aviation history professor. "They figured it out. Pilots want to get to their destination alive as much as anybody, so they don't mess around."
Like the 787, the Boeing 747 had a lot of issues when it started flying in 1970, aviation consultant Michael Boyd said.
And as with the former model, Boeing will work through the current aircraft's issues and move on, the company has said.
CNN's Junko Ogura, Ben Brumfield, Katia Hetter, Marnie Hunter, Jim Barnett and Todd Sperry contributed to this report.
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