The South Bayview Bulldog

Public confidence has been badly shaken by revelations that the large lithium ion batteries which power 787 Dreamliner jets are dangerously unreliable. The damage has been done not just to Boeing aircraft and its new jetliner, but to a vast range of industry and government elements who are supposed to know what’s going on. In the case of the 787 batteries,  assurances that it was safe are now seen to be just plain wrong.  Further, no one seems to know how such an alarming misconception could have gotten started and been perpetuated even into the daily commercial service of these jets.   The top transportation safety official in the U.S. says that, among others, the Federal Aviation Administration accepted test results from Boeing in 2007 that failed to properly assess the risks of smoke or fire from the batteries. Deorah Hersman of the National Transportation Safety Board said that in a battery failure this year one of the eight cells had a short circuit and the fire spread to the rest of the cells. Boeing’s tests showed no indication that the new lithium-ion batteries could erupt in flames  Boeing wrongly concluded that the batteries  were likely to emit smoke less than once in every 10 million flight hours. Once the planes were placed in service the batteries overheated and emitted smoke twice in January and caused one fire, after about 50,000 hours of commercial flights. In effect all bets are off about the lithium-ion battery. Boeing has been given clearance to fly the 787 for test purposes but all other planes remain on the ground and airlines are being warned to expect delays in scheduled deliveries.

Congratulations to Leaside’s Bob Arsenault and his wife Judy Anglin who learned this week that they had won  tickets to the 85th Annual Academy Awards red carpet arrivals event to be held Sunday February 24, 2013 in Los Angeles. Bob and Judy entered an online lottery on a whim and have just been notified that they are among the select winners of a pair of tickets for bleacher seats along the red carpet.  Bob and Judy are well known along South Bayview, having lived here for 20 years. They are pictured (inset) in their usual jovial state of mind dining in Paris. Nice work guys.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to  build new gate posts at the entrance to Rosedale on Crescent Road just east of the subway station. We won’t ask who paid, we think we know. But look, the presumably cultured residents on the north side of the street are using the gate pillar to create a nice separator between their blue and their green bins. Poo. Bet if we had pillars like that we wouldn’t clutter them up with garbage cans. No way. Yonge and Roxborough News

The U.S. Post Office will end Saturday service in August in an attempt to save nearly $2 billion and set the service on a profitable footing. The Postal Service is semi-independent but ultimately controlled by Congress which has failed to take action to permit the post office to function in the black. Commentators say they aren’t sure how the Postal Service is able to say it will stop Saturday mail delivery without express approval from the Congress. Congress is typically dysfunctional when the government is split between political parties. Among the issues is the low cost of first class mail in the U.S. now set at 46 cents, as opposed to over 60 cents in Canada. Canada eliminated Saturday delivery more than a decade ago.