Though Northwest Airlines has canceled more than 10 percent of its flights nationwide over the last few days because of pilot shortages, weather and air traffic control problems, those problems haven't spread to its Sea-Tac flights.

The airline has maintained its flight schedule here without resorting to outright cancellations.

According to records compiled by Flightstats.com, the Minneapolis-based airline has canceled none of its own flights from Sea-Tac this week and only one code-share flight, an Alaska Airlines flight to Anchorage today that carries passengers from Northwest, American and Continental as well as Alaska's own.

Southwest Airlines, seeking to restart its profit growth engine, today added six new daily non-stop flights to its Seattle schedule including four daily flights to Denver.

The Dallas-based airline also added one additional daily roundtrip between Seattle and San Jose and Seattle and Sacramento in California.

The low-cost carrier trimmed its Seattle-Chicago schedule by one flight, leaving three round-trips daily.

The additions to Southwest Seattle schedule are among dozens of changes the airline made Wednesday. Those changes are aimed at returning Southwest to traditional profit growth.

The new flights will encounter plenty of competition.
Three airlines, United, Frontier and Alaska, for instance, fly the Seattle-Denver route now. United, which has a huge Denver hub, dominates the route with a 48 percent market share. Alaska is in second place with a 25 percent share, and Frontier is just a few percentage points behind with a 20 percent share, according to Farecast.com.

On the California routes, which Southwest already competes, it is in second place versus Alaska. Alaska now has 60 percent of the Sacramento traffic. Southwest has 33 percent. In San Jose, Alaska has a 64 percent market share versus Southwest's 29 percent.

Southwest, which is noteworthy for its unassigned seating scheme, also hinted at a press conference that it may soon adopt a different seating plan. The airline experimented with pre-assigned seats in San Diego for several months before returning to its traditio seating scheme.

We posted two weeks ago that Starbucks would be expanding lunch offerings with items such as curried chicken and Asian sesame-noodle salads.

Now a story from Reuters fills in more of the lunchtime fare: a tomato mozzarella salad, a "fiesta salad" with chicken, corn and black beans, with regional fare to include albacore tuna penne, champagne pasta salad and bowtie pasta with goat cheese in addition to the curry chicken and sesame noodle salads.

Want a parfait? Starbucks also plans to start selling two yogurt-based ones, as well as a raspberry mocha Frappuccino and an iced raspberry mocha nationwide.

The new food, Reuters reported, comes as the No. 1 coffee shop chain faces steeper competition from chains such as McDonald's Corp. that are improving their coffee offerings.

Remember that lawyer-rating site launched last month? Well, Avvo.com will have a lot fewer ratings given some changes being made by the Seattle company.

Now attorneys with only minimal info gathered from their bar association will have non-numbered ratings (no concern/attention) instead of a number that previously ranged from 1 to 10. The numbers will only come into play, said spokeswoman Paula Gottlob, when additional information is added, such as other accomplishments, publications, etc.

A lot of that info comes when lawyers claim their own profiles, something more than 2,500 have done, Gottlob said. The site also has seen more than 100,000 unique visitors as of Monday, she said.

I asked if the rating changes had anything to do with the lawsuit filed in mid-June that claimed the rating methodology was error-prone and manipulation.

“No. We’ve been making changes to the site since day one,” she said, pointing to the switch made June 6 – the day after the launch – of one rating category, from “trustworthiness” to “professional conduct.”

You can find CEO Mark Britton’s blog post on the topic here.