The Boeing Co. admitted publicly today what had been an open secret in the aerospace industry for months: its new 747-8 won't be delivered on time.

The 747-8 joins the oft-delayed 787 Dreamliner among new Boeing jetliners not meeting their promised commercial delivery dates.

The 747-8, an enlarged and updated version of the venerable jumbo jet, won't be delivered to its first commercial customer until the third quarter of 2010, the company said today.

The first revised 747 originally had been set for delivery in late 2009.

Boeing blamed the delays on four factors: design changes, contractor delays, a shortage of engineers to work on the plane and the recently-concluded Machinists Union strike.

Sources in the aerospace industry said the program had been starved of needed engineering brainpower when many of its engineers were reassigned to the 787 project to get that revolutionary new plane up and running.

The 787 Dreamliner is now some 18 months behind schedule for its first flight because of supplier problems and manufacturing glitches.

"Our entire team has worked hard to mitigate growing schedule risk on this program but have been unable to overcome the collective impact of work statement increases to the original design, a tight supply of engineering resources and the recent Machinists' strike," said Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief executive Scott Carson.

In addition to the 787 and 747 schedule delays, Boeing is now delaying the delivery of its popular 737. The company recently discovered that small metal fixtures installed in some 350 the aircraft at Spirit Aerosystems in Wichita lacked necessary corrosion-proofing.

Those fixtures, called "nutplates," are being replaced on yet undelivered 737s. Planes equipped with those deficient parts that are already in service are not in danger of failure, the company said, but the nutplates must be replaced sometime during the planes' maintenance schedules.

Boeing has sold more freighter versions of th 747-8 than passenger versions. The only major customer for the passenger version is Germany's Lufthansa, which has ordered 20.

Your living room table is stacked with a half-dozen remote control units. You don’t know what they do. So many buttons. If you press MENU, can you get a grilled tuna sandwich delivered? Probably not. If only there were a 12-year-old you could call.

Better yet, you could attend next Monday’s “Cable 101” class sponsored by Tacoma Power’s Click! Network.

It’s free and will be held Monday at 3 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. at the Tacoma Public Utilities auditorium, 3628 S. 35th St. in Tacoma.

Expect to learn about digital receivers, the upcoming digital transition, high definition programming and how that remote control thingamajig works and what all those little buttons actually do.

For reservations or more information, call 253-502-8900.

Boeing and its 20,300 engineers and technical workers have reached a tentative agreement on a new four-year contract, apparently dodging the possibility of a second prolonged strike this year for the aerospace company.

The deal must be ratified by a majority of union members in a ballot that will be mailed within a week. Those mailed ballots will be counted Dec. 1, said union spokesman Bill Dugovich.

The new deal will have the union negotiating committee's approval recommendation.

The agreement came about 11 a.m today. The two sides had extended their deadline for reaching an accord for three days while they worked out the details of the pact. A mediator helped facilitate those talks.

Neither Boeing nor the union immediately revealed the specifics of the deal. The union said it wants to lay those details out to its representative councils early this evening.

Like the Machinists Union pact ratified earlier this month after a 58-day strike, the new deal is for four years instead of the usual three.

Chief among the issues the union brought to the bargaining table was protection against further outsourcing of jobs to other contractors either here in the United States or overseas.

Informal negotiations had been going for months, and more serious "main table" talks began Oct. 29 at a Seattle-area hotel.

Among Boeing's objectives in entering the talks was to shift more of its rising medical plan costs to employees, to shift new employees to a defined contribution 401K-like pension plan and the retain its flexibility in deciding whether Boeing employees or outside contractors would do design work.

The company also sought to create a separate contract for about 100 engineers in Utah who traditionally had been covered by the Puget Sound area contract. The union had resisted that effort apparently successfully.

The deal concerns two separate contracts, one for the engineers and one for the technical workers. Those contracts were due to expire on Dec. 1, but the union said it would continue working beyond that date if it thought more talks would move the agreement forward.

The proposed contract would reportedly move the expiration date to mid-October.

Union engineers make an average of about $88,531 a year now while technical workers on average are paid about $66,811 annually, according to the union. The union had sought substantial raises for its members, arguing that their pay had fallen below industry standards.

More details will be available after the union releases specifics tonight on either Boeing's negotiations Web site or SPEEA's site.

The negotiations were a test for new leadership on both sides of the negotiation table, Boeing's new labor relations vice president Doug Kight and SPEEA's new executive director Ray Goforth.

I used the dreaded e-word, "earmark," to describe the $6 million federal authorization in a recent Amtrak aid bill to help build the Point Defiance bypass in Tacoma.

The state Department of Transportation's rail office corrects me, saying the $6 million wasn't the result of pork barrel politics but the result of a competition among rail projects in which the Point Defiance project won among dozens of proposals on its merits.

The Point Defiance bypass is a rail route from Freighthouse Square near the Tacoma Dome to Nisqually via the former BNSF Prairie Line through South Tacoma.

The route will trim 14 minutes from the Seattle-Portland Amtrak passenger train schedule because it will bypass the slow going along the Tacoma waterfront and the delays caused by the single-track Nelson Bennett Tunnel under Point Defiance.

Sound Transit will use the bypass route to reach Lakewood with its Sounder commuter trains. The transit agency will provide the bulk of the funding for the new route.

Presidential candidate John McCain made "earmark" a dirty word in the campaign by claiming those projects inserted into bills were pork and lacked the merit needed to win the money otherwise. Perhaps the most famous of those projects was the bridge nicknamed the "Bridge to Nowhere" that linked Ketchikan in Alaska to the island where its airport sits.

As Boeing and its engineering and technical workers union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, move fitfully toward some sort of definitive contract proposal, the union turned up the heat on the company last night.

The union's Northwest Council voted unanimously to give negotiators the authority to submit a ballot to the union's 21,000 members for strike authorization. The timing of that ballot is up to the negotiators.

The union's move came as the two sides are slogging through the contract proposal line by line at a Seattle-area hotel.

A Boeing spokesperson called the strike vote authorization a procedural matter.

The company and the union are alternately hopeful and pessimistic about the chances of resolution.

Wages, pensions and healthcare remain to be resolved.

The talks have already moved past Boeing's initial deadline of Tuesday of reaching a deal.

The two sides are working with a federal mediator to hammer out the details of the pact, which now appears to be a four-year deal like the one agreed to by Boeing and its union machinists after a 58-day strike.

Northwest Airlines' six-month-old flight from Seattle to London's Heathrow Airport has become a casualty of the merger between Northwest and Delta Air Lines.

Delta is redeploying the aircraft used on the flight to what it hopes is a more lucrative route. Service ends on the route Jan. 8. Passengers booked on that route after then will be shifted to other flights.

Delta is taking little time in reshuffling its fleet and route structure to serve different cities overseas including more flights to Toyko and new flights to Africa from Atlanta.

The demise of the Delta London flight leaves British Airways as the sole incumbent on the non-stop route.