Husky Jobs, the database used by University of Washington students to search for jobs and internships, has seen a steep drop-off of listings since June.

Judy Colburn, associate director of student development at the UWT, said that in June the board had 1,531 listings. As of yesterday it had 837.

"What I'm seeing is, at least in Pierce County, some job openings in healthcare, some in technology... healthcare and IT, those have the most," Colburn said today.

I talked with Colburn about the challenges in the job market and asked what advice she has for students entering the work force.

"I really encourage students to use any network they can," she said. "Everybody is a potential lead. I'm telling folks to go out and do informational interviews, a form of networking, to get one-on-one with folks even if they don't have (any openings) right now."

On Sunday, I'll have a story in The News Tribune's business section about finding a job in this economy.

Beset with continuing production and development delays on most of its new aircraft programs, Boeing Co. today realigned its leadership and reorganized its Commercial Airplanes division.

The company will consolidate its supplier management, fabrication, propulsion systems and its manufacturing and quality control functions into a single new organization.

Heading the new operation to be called Supply Chain Management and Operations will be Ray Conner, 53. Conner most recently was vice president of sales for the commercial airplanes division.

Production and development programs will be united under the leadership of Pat Shanahan, formerly vice president and general manager of the 787 program. Shanahan will supervise both the 787 and the 747-8 programs as well as other development programs such as the 777 Freighter.

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One out of every 319 households in Pierce County was in some stage of foreclosure in November, according to numbers released today by RealtyTrac, a company that collects foreclosure data nationwide.

Pierce County’s rate was easily the highest of any Washington county and well above the rate of the U.S. as a whole, which was one in 488 households.

According to RealtyTrac, the Washington state foreclosure rate for November was one in 948 households.

King County’s rate was one in 1,133; Thurston’s one in 984 and Kitsap’s one in 786.
If there was good news in the report, it was that there were fewer foreclosures in Pierce County during November than during October.

In October, 1,308 Pierce County homes were in foreclosure. Last month there were 969.

Lisa Drury, head of recording at the Pierce County Auditor’s office, suggested that at least part of the decrease was due to the unusually low number of business days in November.

“There were only 17 business days because of the holidays and the way the weekends fell,” Drury said.

The increase in rates of foreclosures fell across the country in November, RealtyTrac reported, partly because of new state laws that lengthened the foreclosure process.

In RealtyTrac's report, Nevada, Florida and Arizona had the nation's top foreclosure rates. In Nevada, one in every 76 homes received a foreclosure filing last month. Florida saw one in every 173 properties receive a foreclosure filing, and in Arizona it was one in every 198 homes.

Rounding out the top 10 were California, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, Colorado, Utah and Idaho.

After two months of relatively good on-time performance, Alaska Airlines fell back in the rankings in October, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports.

Alaska, Sea-Tac Airport's dominant airline, was 13th in on-time arrivals among the 19 U.S. airlines that the federal agency tracks. Even so, 84.4 percent of the airline's flights were on-time in October.

The nation's airlines performed exceptionally well during October with an overall on-time arrival of 86 percent. That surpassed both the October 2007 mark (78.2 percent) and September 2008's (84.9 percent).

Number one on the agency's list was Memphis-based regional carrier Pinnacle Airlines. Pinnace flies as Northwest Airlink and Delta Connection in the Midwest and South. Pinnacle flights were 90.7 percent on time in October.

Following in order below Pinnacle were Northwest Airlines (90 percent), Hawaiian Airlines (89.9 percent), Southwest Airlines (89.6 percent) and Frontier Airlines (89.1 percent).

At Sea-Tac Airport, Southwest performed the best in October with an 87.7 percent on-time rate. Skywest Airlines, which flies as Delta Connection and United Express from Sea-Tac, was second with 85.8 percent of its flights on time.

United was third with an 85.2 percent on-time record. In fourth place at Sea-Tac was Delta with an 84.6 percent on-time performance. Alaska was fifth with 84.1 percent of its flights on time.

Other significant statistics gleaned from the BTS report:

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Boeing this morning issued the press release that nearly everyone in the aviation industry had been expecting all week: the 787 Dreamliner will be delayed once again.

The brief announcement blamed the 58-day Machinists Union strike and new problems with fasteners for most of the delay.

Under the new schedule, the first Dreamliner will fly by the end of the second quarter next year, and the first plane will be delivered to launch customer All Nippon Airways in the first quarter of 2010.

Today's delay announcement was the fourth official delay since the plane made its premature debut at a celebration at the company's Everett plant on July 8, 2007.

The first example of the plane was scheduled to fly then within two months of its rollout.

The latest delay puts the program nearly two years behind schedule. All Nippon was originally scheduled to receive the first commercial 787 in May of this year.

"Our industry team has made progress with structural testing, systems hardware qualification and production, but we must adjust our schedule for these two unexpected disruptions," said Scott Carson, head of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes Group.

The fastener issue emerged during structural testing of the plane. Some fasteners were too long because of a Boeing specification error. Those must be found and replaced before the planes can fly.

Industry sources say Boeing is still struggling with weight issues in the first planes and is encountering difficulties meshing all of the software programs used to fly the revolutionary composite airliner.

For much of the airline industry, battered by the declining economy worldwide, the delay will in some ways be a relief. The airlines won't have to find the money to pay for their new planes immediately, a tough task in a credit crisis, and they won't have to add planes to their fleets when traffic is declining.

Boeing nonetheless is expected to pay customers monetary penalties or provide some of them substitute aircraft.

Already, Boeing has arranged to produce more of its 767 aircraft to fill gaps in airline schedules left because of the Dreamliner delays.