Lithium battery rule hangs in the balance

Lithium battery rule hangs in the balance    Air cargo industry officials are keeping their fingers crossed that President Obama's recent executive order requiring agencies to take a second look at regulations and weed out obsolete, wasteful or overly costly rules will derail a Department of Transportation proposal to curtail the amount of lithium batteries allowed on aircraft.
   The rulemaking would require the ubiquitous power packs to be treated as full hazardous material, meaning new packaging, labeling, documentation, training and other procedures. It would also limit storage onboard the plane to cargo compartments accessible to the crew or locations equipped with a fire suppression system.
   All industry sectors uniformly oppose the proposal, saying the United States should just follow improved international standards promulgated by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2009. They say the DOT's cost/benefit analysis seriously underestimated compliance costs to businesses and consumers by several billion dollars. No one knows if the draft final rule was changed in any way following the open comment period.
   The Office of Management and Budget is doing its own economic analysis of the proposed rule. Shippers and carriers are also taking solace in the fact that Rep. James Oberstar, the powerful chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee who introduced a bill in 2009 pushing for many of the changes the DOT subsequently recommended, lost his seat in the November election. House Republican leaders have instructed committee chairman to take an inventory of rules that hurt job creation.
   Perhaps the president's National Export Initiative will also give pause to regulators. Although the vast majority of lithium batteries on planes are imported for cell phones, laptops and so on, batteries could be components of electronics that are manufactured in the United States and then exported.

CASS-USA adds domestic component
   Cargo Network Services, the International Air Transport Association's U.S. subsidiary, several months ago launched a domestic version of its Cargo Accounts Settlement System (CASS) with carriers such as United, US Airways and various forwarders.
   CNS has operated the billing and payment system for more than 25 years, but it has been limited to invoicing forwarders for international export shipments.
   The new service offers the ability to invoice customers on a weekly basis and itemize air waybill charges for transportation services within the United States.
   The automated billing system makes reconciliation easier, allows for faster revenue collection, reduces labor costs and assists with dispute resolution.
   CNS and other IATA affiliates around the world make sure shippers and freight forwarders are creditworthy ' a process that includes visiting them in person ' and checking their financial history before admitting them to the program.
   Existing CASS-USA international customers can participate in the domestic service at no additional cost.
   It should be noted that it took four years since CNS openly broached the idea of a domestic CASS-USA version to mesh the two e-billing processes.
   One complication is that domestic transactions tend to cover more numerous, smaller shipments at lower values than international air cargo.
Addicted to paper
   For all the talk of industry and government needing to automate when it comes to supply chain collaboration and compliance, it's evident there are dead-enders still reluctant to change.
   The International Air Transport Association is stressing the need for carriers and their customers to adopt electronic documentation for their transactions. Customs agencies and other parts of government bureaucracies all over the world are striving to some degree to receive forms in electronic format.
   But it's hard to get from here to there when you have regulators like one Sandra Scott recently dealt with.
   Scott is senior director of international compliance at SEKO Worldwide, a Chicago-based global forwarder that does a lot of air freight business. At a Cargo Network Services mini-conference held in Arlington, Va., Feb. 9-10, she described what happened when dealing with a large agency that requires the company to provide an annual report of all its shipments.
   The document was huge ' at least 55 pages of an Excel spreadsheet '    as you can imagine it would be for a large transportation intermediary. When Scott asked if she could provide the document on a disc or flash drive, the bureaucrats said they preferred it on paper.
   Scott had to go to a local print ship ' how 1990s ' to produce the document. She was frustrated too because all the information already resides in the Automated Export System.
   'It's difficult to provide paper when we're trying to go to electronic processing,' she said.

Hazmat spill delays reporter
   As part of my job I write about transportation of hazardous materials ' mishaps and new regulations to improve safety.
   Recently, the subject struck close to home. I was on my way Jan. 31 to cover a maritime trade conference in Tampa and was eager to get down there and so I could go to dinner at the local Cheesecake Factory near my hotel. Everything was going like clockwork at Dulles International Airport until it came time to board the United flight.
   Boarding was delayed because a five-gallon drum of epoxy spilled in the cargo hold, according to a United ramp worker and an airport spokeswoman. The epoxy didn't pose a health threat, but had to be properly disposed of, the worker said.
   The airport fire department was called in to identify the material and how to handle it. It was not immediately clear if the container was not properly sealed or what else might have caused the spill.
   You would have thought there was an eight-alarm fire with as many fire engines and emergency vehicles circling the plane. There didn't seem to be a lot of urgent activity.
   It leaves you to wonder if an accident like this is too good of an opportunity for the fire department to pass up to do some training since there fortunately are so few opportunities to respond to real-life situations.
   So much for my dinner plans.
   United finally brought in another Boeing 757 for the flight. More than two hours later we were ready to leave. But we had waited so long that the bad weather forecast for that evening finally arrived. A winter mix began to fall and we had to spend more time taxiing to the far end of the airport to undergo deicing.