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Contributors
Marce Edwards is the business editor. She has been at The News Tribune for seven years and has written about technology and big businesses in the South Sound including Weyerhaeuser and Russell. Before moving to Tacoma, she worked at The Idaho Statesman in Boise. She is a Northwest native who likes to garden and refuses to use an umbrella. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and two kids.
C.R. Roberts is a Tacoma native. Before joining The News Tribune, he worked as a freelance writer and part-time cowhand on a cattle ranch in Northern Idaho. He writes about small business, personal finance and other business issues.
John Gillie writes about the aerospace and airline industries, commercial development and consumer issues. During his 30-year-tenure at The News Tribune he has covered issues as diverse as the Native American fishing rights disputes, crime and the courts, the wood products industry and energy. He lived in Tacoma with his family for 25 years, but now lives in Kent because his wife heads a five-state non-profit foundation headquartered in Ballard, and it only seemed a sensible compromise to make considering their workplaces are 40 miles apart.
Kelly Kearsley has been a business reporter at The News Tribune since 2005. She covers the Port of Tacoma and international trade. Being born and raised in Spokane she’s used to living in cities with inferiority complexes and, in fact, prefers it. Prior to working at The News Tribune, she spent three years as a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon and another year working stints for The Associated Press and Seattle Times. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and miniature schnauzer.
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Most airlines, including SeaTac's Alaska and Horizon, this week are reporting decreased traffic in June as higher fares and the sour economy start taking their toll on ticket sales.
Alaska Air Group, parent company of Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air, said traffic fell at both carriers in June.
Alaska's traffic decreased two percent compared with June last year. Horizon's fell 4.2 percent.
Those traffic decreases meant that Alaska's planes operated with a higher percentage of empty seats last month. Alaska's load factor (the percentage of seats filled by paying passengers) was 79.5 percent compared with 81.3 percent in June 2007.
At Horizon, the load factor was 78 percent compared with 79.6 percent in the same month last year.
At Fort Worth,Texas-based American Airlines, traffic fell by 3.1 percent in June.
And at Houston's Continental Airlines, traffic dropped .9 percent in June.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines' traffic increased .7 percent last month, but its load factor fell by 3.9 percentage points because capacity increases far outstripped it traffic increases.
The composite horizontal stabilizer, the horizontal part of the Boeing 787's tail, has passed a critical stress test in Italy where it's made.
The stabilizer, built by Italy's Alenia Aeronautica, withstood 150 percent of the maximum aerodynamic load it could encounter in flight, said the Italian company.
In such a test, the horizontal stabilizer typically is mounted in a heavy steel superstructure and then deliberately bent upward by powerful hydraulic jacks while instruments measure its deflection and check for breakage.
The stabilizer was tested "well in excess of the required 150 percent limit load" until it broke, Alenia said.
Boeing will soon check the Dreamliner wings in a similar test in Everett.
The Boeing Co. is on pace to deliver between 480 to 490 airliners this year. During the first half, it delivered 241, it said today.
The second quarter production at Boeing's Puget Sound factories in Renton and Everett, totaled 126 aircraft, up modestly from the 115 aircraft the company delivered in the first quarter.
The company delivered 187 of its popular 737s, nine 747s, six 767s and 39 777s in the first half of the year.
Despite a record backlog of some 3,600 orders, Boeing has refrained from accelerating its production rate sharply as it has done in the past during good times.
Probably a good thing. With analysts predicting that financially strapped airlines may cancel or postpone up to 25 percent of orders, Boeing won't have resort to dramatic layoffs to cope with reduced orders.
