Eideard

FedEx could learn today [Friday] what happened to a package containing radioactive materials that went missing a day before.

The company said it is searching in the Tennessee area and that the item is safe as long as nobody tampers with the protective packaging around it.

The item is a cylinder containing rods used for hospital machinery that were being sent to a person in Knoxville, Tennessee, said Sandra Munoz, a company spokeswoman. “The rods are used for quality control calibration,” Munoz said. “We have lots of experience in handling this kind of shipment.”

Munoz said the company may learn more Friday morning when two employees who handled the shipment return to work.

Uh, no one swiped the bar code in transit?

My experience, memory of screw-ups like this – unfortunately – usually ends in tragedy. Often, someone walked off with the radioactive marker source, putting themselves and their families at serious risk.

Phew! They found it. It had been double-boxed and the outer box with shipping info went to the destination. The inner box containing the radioactive rod inside a protective tube – was left aside because of no shipping info – in a FedEx terminal in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Fleets could have 200,000 electric vehicles in service by 2015, generating the volume needed to bring down prices and make EVs broadly practical, according to a new report released by the Electrification Coalition, a Washington, DC, group created in 2009 to promote development of electric-drive vehicles.

FedEx expects to see EV costs “overtake internal combustion light-duty vehicles in the 2015 to 2016 timeframe,” said FedEx chairman Fredrick Smith at a press conference called to release the coalition’s “Fleet Electrification Roadmap.” With advances in battery technology promising to cut initial capital costs for EVs, fleet operating characteristics could offer “per-mile costs that are 70% to 80% less than current [internal combustion vehicle] costs,” Smith said.

Looking at the 250-million personal vehicles in the U.S., Smith pointed out that the infrastructure for recharging EVs “at home or in parking lots” is already largely in place and that “the vast majority of fuel that would be used is already being produced and dissipated at night right now.”

Acknowledging GE’s announcement that it would purchase 25,000 EVs for fleet operations, Smith said the fleet roadmap outlined by the coalition “has real potential to move [conversion to EVs] much faster…”

“It is important to consider all of the applications where electric drive technology makes sense, and what we have found is that the case is very strong for a number of fleet applications over the next five years,” said Smith. “Fleet electrification alone will not solve our pressing energy-security challenges, but by bringing costs down, it will provide a critical boost to the consumer electric vehicle market.”

I saw Smith being interviewed about this, yesterday, on Bloomberg TV. Though FedEx already has halved their operating costs in urban markets by switching to diesel hybrids, they’re now ready to move those vehicles out into suburban markets – and replace them with pure electric-drive trucks.

UPS 747-400 crashed a few minutes after takeoff from Dubai on September 3rd

Yemen has arrested a woman suspected of mailing the explosive parcels from the country to the US that sparked a global security alert. The arrest took place on Saturday in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, after security forces surrounded a house where a suspect believed to have sent the packages was hiding.

A Yemeni security official said that the woman had been traced through a telephone number she left with a cargo company…

Security officials have been on high alert since the UK and the United Arab Emirates intercepted two packages containing explosive material that were being shipped by air from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago…

Al Jazeera’s Monica Villamizar, reporting from Washington, DC…said that US investigators will now look at previously shipped packages from Yemen to determine if they were used as a “dry run” by al-Qaeda.

Police in Dubai said the package they found bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda. They also said that the ink cartridge found at the sorting facility was packed with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN…the same substance that was packed into the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man who attempted to ignite a bomb on board an airliner over the US on December 25 last year. The police said the explosive materials were wired to a mobile phone SIM card hidden inside the printer…

The screening of cargo has been a point of debate in the US; in 2007, congress directed the Transportation Security Administration to screen all cargo carried on passenger flights beginning this year, according to US media.

“Cargo is in big pallets, it’s wrapped, its prepared for shipment,” Bob Ayers, security analyst, said. “You can’t X-ray the large pallet in many cases. You don’t tear it apart because its already been pre-packaged, so cargo has always been less rigorously inspected than baggage going into a passenger aircraft.”

Both UPS and FedEx said they had halted all packages being sent from Yemen to the US while the incident is investigated.

In September, a large fire broke out in the cargo hold of a UPS cargo jet shortly after it took off from the Dubai airport. The plane crashed, killing both crew members. Our correspondent said that investigators will probably now check to see if any cargo from Yemen was on board.

Lots of ways to build a better bomb if you’re trying to bring down a cargo plane. Cellphone triggers are the latest, preferred by many in the Middle East. By no means are methods limited to what you see used in this case.

Fire in the hold of an ocean freighter is comparatively easy to control – with early detection. Airplanes are flimsy critters at best.

UPDATE: Engineering student released after authorities discover a different woman had used the student’s name and personal information when shipping the bombs.

Citing declining U.S. oil production and escalating world demand for energy, Navistar unveiled its new eStar all-electric delivery/cargo van in Elkhart, Ind., where the new vehicle will be built.

The eStar’s entry into the U.S. market has been long-anticipated. It is a culmination of Navistar’s 2009 acquisition of U.K. electric vehicle manufacturer Modec and a $2.4 billion investment by the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – funds that were matched by the trucking industry at large, for a total investment of $4.8 billion in the research and development of clean energy vehicles.

The new eStar is not a hybrid truck or a conversion from a gasoline- or diesel-burning vehicle. Rather, it is a purpose-built Class 3 delivery and cargo van that…balances the needs of the environment with the needs of businesses in the United States…

According to FedEx spokeswoman Deborah Willig, test vehicles evaluated by FedEx were able to work for an entire 8-hour day without requiring additional battery charges. And in the event that quick vehicle turnaround times are required, Terblanche said the battery cassette in an eStar can be swapped out in 20 minutes – much like a gigantic cell phone – returning the vehicle to the road for another 100 miles. Terblanche said the eStar easily is adaptable to future battery technology, which means the truck’s performance and range actually could improve as new power systems become available.

The first one off the assembly line goes to FedEx. Which makes great sense.

Good ol’ George W knew who to pay off

The American Conservative Union, which bills itself as the nation’s oldest conservative grass-roots lobbying organization, has found itself fending off charges that it put its principles up for sale.

In a letter sent last month to FedEx, the group offered its support in a bitter legislative dispute with United Parcel Service, but said it wanted a contract of up to $3.4 million to wage a campaign to win support for FedEx’s position. When FedEx did not agree, executives at the company said, the conservative group’s chairman, David A. Keene, turned around and signed a letter using the group’s logo endorsing the UPS view and blasting FedEx.

The group’s letter to FedEx, dated June 30, and the subsequent Keene letter were first reported by Politico on its Web site…

The initial letter from the ACU was written by Dennis Whitfield, and it proposed to a FedEx vice president in the Washington office, Rick Rodgers, an elaborate campaign of building support.

“We stand with FedEx in opposition to this legislation,” Mr. Whitfield wrote in a reference to a bill that would change labor law and expand organized union influence across the FedEx empire…

Mr. Whitfield proposed contacting 150,000 people at least seven times about the supposed dangers of the legislation, at a cost of $2.15 million. The other costs would be for a radio campaign.

FedEx declined, Mr. Lane said. Then, on July 15, the letter from a coalition of groups supporting UPS in the dispute was sent to Frederick W. Smith, the FexEx chairman, with the ACU logo and Mr. Keene’s signature.

The corruption and cronyism that got its biggest boost with the Contract On America and culminated in the Bush-Cheney Reich continues unabated in Republican circles. They do not recognize crime, bigotry or deceit as the guiding lights of their popular defeat in the last election.

I wonder how much UPS handed over?

Regardless of whether you’re talking politics or automotive technologies, the voting and driving public often gravitates to what’s new and fresh.

This herd mentality suggests that there’s hope in what’s new simply because it’s new. Focusing on automotive technology, the green trend AOL Autos identified at the recent 2009 Detroit Auto Show seems to be pushing buyers into two camps: diesel or hybrid.

But we’ll let you in on a secret: The traditional four-stroke internal combustion engine isn’t dead, nor is it irrelevant to the green movement. Not by a long shot.

The initial revelation is that efficient gas engine-powered cars ain’t dead. Wow. Whoda thunk it?

All I have to do is look out the window at the number of Mitsubishi Eclipses, Honda Fits, Toyota Yarisi, VW Beetles making it down the street. All efficient. All a pretty good return on economy and performance vs. cost. People in the hinterlands ain’t as dumb as Detroit thinks they are.

So let’s assume you’re interested in driving green. By this we mean you want a fuel-efficient vehicle that reduces your carbon footprint. Today, the celebrities of the green movement are diesel- and hybrid-powered vehicles.

Here’s a quick review of these different technologies. The defining characteristic of the diesel engine is its compression ignition cycle; this means that the engine uses ultra-high compression ratios in the combustion chamber to ignite the fuel-air charge (gasoline-burning internal combustion engines use spark plugs to fire up).

The defining characteristic of a hybrid is that these vehicles use a combination of electric motors and internal combustion engines (working in tandem) to propel the vehicle.

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A cargo plane has crash-landed and burst into flames near Tokyo, killing two crew members aboard, officials say.

They say the accident happened as the Federal Express Corp plane landed at Narita international airport from Guangzhou in China.

Japan’s NHK public broadcaster showed dramatic footage of the plane landing, bouncing and then bursting into flames on Monday morning local time.

It took firefighters about 30 minutes to bring the fire under control.

The crash reportedly happened in strong winds, though it is not known whether the weather conditions were a factor in the crash.

I’m just about the only member of my family who’s never been a pilot. So, something this terrible always hits home.