The 7-week-old Machinist Union strike at Boeing may force workers off their jobs at Vought Aircraft Industries' Charleston, S.C. aircraft plant.

The Boeing supplier announced today that it has already produced enough composite fuselage sections for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner to supply Boeing through 19 planes.

Boeing is assembling the first five 787s at its Everett plant now. That production halted, however, when the machinists struck Sept. 6.

Vought is one of a handful of major suppliers for the 787 building a large section of the plane's fuselage.

Vought has already laid off outside contractor employees in Charleston and redeployed some of its own workforce to work on equipping fuselages already fabricated with wiring and other equipment.

If the strike isn't settled soon, the company may consider more drastic measures.

"Over the next 30 days, a variety of additional actions related to the 787 program activities are being considered," Vought said, "including the possible temporary shutdown of the entire plant."

Boeing and the union are meeting this week in Washington, D.C. with a federal mediator in an effort to find a solution to their disagreement.

The news about gas prices is so good that I'm almost tempted to go out and buy a Suburban.

At one station, the 76 at 10712 Bridgeport Way, gas is selling for $2.49 a gallon. Eight more stations in Pierce County are selling petrol for less than $2.60.

At midweek I wrote a story about a Safeway at South 56th Street and Park Avenue selling gas for the then-amazing price of $2.72 a gallon. That's soooo old news now.

The memory of $4.30 gas is too fresh in my mind to consider buying a gas hog, but consider what a relief this price drop must mean to owners of big SUVs.

At the summer's highest average price in Pierce County, $4.36 a gallon, it would have cost a Suburban owner with a 39-gallon tank $170.04 for a fillup. At $2.49, that same fillup would cost "only" $97.11, a savings of $72.93.

If you drove your suburban in town and got the EPA rated 14 mpg, that you'd be able to go 546 miles before the next tank full.

The traditional fall vacation slowdown coupled with falling fuel prices and a slackening business travel demand is creating new air travel bargains from Sea-Tac Airport.

Consider some of these recent roundtrip bargain fares from Farecast.com:

* San Francisco $145
* Los Angeles $165, down $83 from the average low price
* Denver, $179, down $55 from the average low price
* Las Vegas, $209, down $56
* San Diego, $209, down $67
* Phoenix, $231, down $51
* Orlando, $231, down $169
* Boston, 298, down $197
* Paris, $652, down $560
* Rome, $754, down $519

Bargain rates are available to some Mexican beach destinations and Hawaii depending on the timing of your visit.

The pilots of an AirTran Airways Boeing 737 that crossed a runway in front of a Northwest Airlines Airbus on takeoff at Sea-Tac Airport last summer say impaired visibility caused them to blunder onto the active runway.

The Airbus A330 widebody bound for London missed a catastrophic collision by some 400 feet. The Northwest flight had left the ground about midway down the runway and passed over the AirTran plane at an altitude of about 425 feet, a new report from the National Transportation Safety Board says.

According to that report, the Sea-Tac tower had told the AirTran plane twice to stop short of the runway where the Northwest flight was taking off, but the AirTran aircraft kept going across Sea-Tac's longest runway despite those orders.

In interviews after the July 2 late night incident, the two pilots of the AirTran flight said they could not see the "hold short" markings or lights on the taxiway, the safety board said.

"The first officer stated that the brightness of the green taxiway centerline lights and a developing haze obscured his view of the taxiway markings, lighting and signage," the report said.

The two AirTran pilots said they didn't see the Northwest plane barreling down the runway at more than 150 mph toward them.

Tacoma airline safety expert said the potential of catastrophy in such incidents is "just awful."

One almost foolproof solution to such runway incursions would be installing traffic lights on the taxiways. The lights would remain red unless a controller specifically trigger them green to allow the planes to cross.

Such a system would eliminate the possibility of miscommunications during the busy post-flight minutes when verbal commands from the tower can be overlooked or ignored.

While such systems have been proposed for years, the FAA has yet to mandate them.

"The FAA in many ways is a great organization, but when it comes to change, they sometimes move like a glacier," he said.

The AirTran flight from Baltimore had landed on the westernmost of Sea-Tac's two parallel runways about the same time the Northwest flight began its takeoff roll on the eastern runway. The AirTran flight exited its runway near the north end of the airport near the cargo ramp.

The Northwest flight taking off to the north, became airborne about even with the airport's central terminal.

The airport said that at the time of the incident, about 10:30 p.m., the taxiway was equipped with lights at the "hold short" line and in-pavement and elevated runway guard lights. Those lights were operating at their lowest brightness.