The moral of the story? If you’ve got cash — or at least sterling credit – now is a VERY good time to be a buyer.

And if you happen to be in the market for a townhouse, I’ve got one in Marysville for sale …

(The company has said only that the plane will fly before July 1; one report – which Boeing won’t comment on — says that the plane will go wheels up around 10 a.m. on June 30. I have no inside scoop on the date, but the time makes some sense to me — it would be right around lunchtime for the dayshift workers at the Everett plant, who could walk over to the Paine Field runway to watch.)

I did three stories for the section:

• One on the role Snohomish County suppliers have played in building the new plane, which also looks at some of the reasons why more 787 suppliers haven’t moved closer to Everett;

• One on the fiercely contested site-selection process that led Boeing to pick Everett as the final assembly site, and lessons that could teach us as Boeing considers putting a second 787 line somewhere else, and;

• And one that looks at some of the engineering breakthroughs Boeing and its partners achieved with the 787, including some things that you read about here first.

This a huge development in the global aerospace world, as I wrote in a just-posted entry at BNet.com. And it has regional ramifactions.

Boeing has struggled to sell planes this year. At last report, it had precisely zero net orders through the first five months of 2009. The reasons why are no suprise: airlines all over the world are facing huge losses in the face of the recession, and the Wall Street credit crisis has made it hard for those who do have cash to get financing to buy new planes.

Faced with this, Boeing announced plans to lay off some 10,000 workers companywide this year. So far, the cuts haven’t been as steep as expected.

Today’s United Airlines news gives hope the layoffs will continue to be light. There are two reasons:

• If Boeing lands the 150-jet order, that will firm up the order book for the next few years — which translates to jobs in Everett, where Boeing builds the 777s and 787s United is considering. 
• And even if it doesn’t, the fact that United is able to get financing to consider such an order signals that the credit freeze is thawing now that summer’s coming on. If United can get financing, so can other airlines, and that means they’ll be able to either buy new jets, or to pay for the jets they already have on order. Both would firm up the order book, which again translates into jobs at Boeing and at its in-state suppliers.

Clearly, we’re not out of the woods yet. But this is some of the best news Washington’s aerospace industry has had in a while.

As I wrote over at BNet.com this week, Boeing scientists are poised to release the results of joint research projects conducted with four airlines, using biofuels derived from a variety of non-food plants. Early results are promising: Air New Zealand says in one trial, using a 50-50 mix of biofuel and traditional kerosene-based JetA resulted in a 65-percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions, and a 1.2 percent increase in fuel efficiency. That would mean savings of more than a ton of fuel for a 747 on a trans-Pacific flight.

One of the most-promising fuel sources is camelina, which is a relative of both canola and rapeseed, both of which are grown in the Northwest.  Some farmers consider it to be a weed, but a handful of farmers grow it on purpose for sale to industrial processors. They get about $9 a bushel, according to this report, which is about three dollars a bushel more than wheat’s selling for today. However, there are no processing facilities in the region, and that will be a stumbling block in the way of creating a new biofuel bonanza for the Palouse.

“The proverbial ‘chicken and the egg’ scenario is very familiar when we start thinking about new crops,” says Stephen Guy, a long-time Palouse agronomist who’s now at WSU.
“Even if farmers can successfully raise a crop, if they don’t have a place to sell it they’re not going to raise it.”

In a Op/Ed piece printed earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, the Cougar-in-Chief — my favorite WSU regent — suggested that the International Civil Aviation Administration should take the lead in setting a global standard for airliner fuel efficiency, in much the same way that it previously mandated standards for jet noise and nitrogen oxide emissions.

The standards should be imposed on jet-makers, like Boeing and Airbus,  because such a standard would be “straightforward and easier to implement than a standard for aircraft operators,” Carson wrote. “And it would help ensure that we continue to see the kind of technological and environmental breakthroughs we pioneered with the 787.”

You can read more about it in one of my recent posts at BNet.com, where I’ve also got the link to the Op/Ed piece in its entirety.

For a while I feared it was forever lost in cyberspace, but last week, the folks at Tiger Oak Publications — which now owns the Washington CEO imprint — reported that they’d managed to recover our old archives. They’re not yet ready to publish them in their own template, but I’m putting the stuff I wrote for the Economic Insider, and the magazine itself, online at a new personal blog I’ve launched for the purpose.

You’re welcome to check it out, and tell me what you think. And a special thanks to my former CEO colleagues Paul Bucalo, Leslie Helms and Chris Winters for all their help with this. Leslie and Chris are now in charge at Seattle Business Monthly, which is one of the magazines I write for.

Ballmer said Wednesday that “the VCs are pulling back” and “the seventh, eighth, and ninth copy of the idea won’t get funded today.”

But there’s still money out there for companies with original ideas, he said. “Most good propositions are still going to get funded. There’s plenty of venture capital out there, relative to ideas.”

That’s interesting, given that last winter we were looking at a freeze in the VC funding flow. One of the last things I wrote for my weekly “Economic Insider” reports for Washington CEO included an insider’s look at what was happening to Puget Sound tech start-ups during the credit crises.

The problem during the credit crisis has been that nobody could envision an  exit strategy for tech start ups.

Early-stage investors want to make money. In the good old days, that meant taking the company public and recouping returns through sales of stock.  But the Wall Street crisis killed the IPO market, which pretty much ended that.

The other option is selling the company. But unless you’re selling to somebody like Microsoft, with its big cash pile, an M&A deal is going to involve borrowing money from somewhere – and that has not been in the cards.

With all the VC exists sealed, that left a lot of investors with a harsh choice: which of their companies will they continue to fund, and which will they let die. Dying tech start-ups, of course, aren’t good for the Washington state economy.

But if what Ballmer’s saying is true — and face it, he probably knows better than us — then the VC spigot is still on, and cash is still available to flow to those with the best ideas. That’s a very encouraging sign for the Puget Sound tech sector.

• The company has settled on a contract with the union for its 1,455 pilots, after nearly 18 months of often-contentious talks; and
• Alaska Air Group shareholders have overwhelmingly signed off on pay packages for top executives, part of  the first wave of say on pay shareholder referendums.

If you’re interested in all that, check out my most-recent post at BNet.com.

But really, the big news about Alaska Airlines is that it delivered the first Copper River salmon of the season this week. Not that many of us underemployed people can afford $32.95 a pound for kings (or even $23.95 a pound for sockeye), and of course, you’ve got to settle for yourself whether the whole thing is merely hype. (Personally, I long thought it was, until I grilled some over a little alder a couple years back, brushed on a little garlic butter … wow.)

No, I just like living in a place where we still get excited about fish. It tells me that we’ve still retained something that makes the Northwest distinct from California. (But note to my old friend, Alaska spokeswoman Marianne Lindsay, the pride of Sigma Kappa and ol’ Port Townsend High – next year let’s get Coach Wulff to catch the first fish; unlike some people, the Wazzu headman actually gets out to fish.) And I think it was a wise stroke of marketing for Alaska to latch on to the Copper River buzz; every May, an Alaska Air Cargo jet delivers not only the first — and priciest — salmon of the year to Seattle, they also bring us our spring.

Enough of that, let’s get back to the analysis.

Given Alaska’s rocky relationship with its unions in recent years — the company is still embroiled in an arbitration suit over its 2005 firing of union baggage handlers — finally getting a contract with the pilots is a very good thing. And the fact that 96 percent of shareholders signed off on CEO Bill Ayer’s $2.02 million paycheck for last year is also a good sign. Alaska Air Group is a signature Seattle company, and aside from Amazon, Seattle companies haven’t had a good run of it lately.

Maybe the Eskimo can bring back our mojo.

The first Chinese-built A320 flies.

Here in Washington, it comes during one of our periodic periods of angst over Boeing’s long-term future in the region. As you’ve no doubt heard, several analysts think it’s highly likely that Boeing will build its next new jet — a 737 replacement plane tentatively scheduled for sometime around 2020 — at an all-new assembly site somewhere in the southeastern United States. Some are even predicting the company could open a second 787 line in some place like Texas.

We’ve head this before. As one of my favorite Boeing-watchers, T.M. Sell, told me recently, “Like rain in winter, this is a regular feature of the Puget Sound emotional landscape. … We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of Boeing first threatening to leave. Perhaps we can all get together and have a cake.”

Personally, I think that Boeing would have a very hard time closing the business case on a second 787 line in Texas. (If you’re really interested, send me a note and I’ll gladly list all the reasons why.) But a new home outside the Northwest for a 737 replacement is a distinct possibility — particularly if Airbus is successful with this new A320 factory in China.

We’ve always assumed that it takes very-high-skill workers to assemble commercial jets. Work done on commercial airplanes has to be precise within a micron; it’s literally a hundred times more demanding than automobile safety tolerances. In addition, each part has to be tracked through the assembly process to certify that it was built and installed correctly. So far, just about every global effort to launch a new jet manufacturing business has failed. The embarassing and strategically costly delays to the 787 are but the latest example of what can go wrong when you try to do too much with an unproven jet-building workforce.

These facts have always been a competitive advantage for Puget Sound in the global aerospace market. But if Airbus and its partner China Aviation Industries Corp. are able to successfully build an A320 assembly line in a new setting, it would mark a sharp shift in that paradigm, showing that high-skill — and high-wage — workers aren’t needed to build high-quality jets after all.

Boeing’s backers tried to get the Legislature interested in this issue during the most-recent session. Frankly, the lawmakers dropped the ball, particularly by failing to act on recommendations that they create new job-training programs for aerospace workers. Yes, it may be counter-intuitive to be worrying about aerospace job-training in the midst of Boeing layoffs, but with tens of thousands of Baby Boomers nearing retirement age, we need to be worried about where Boeing will find people to replace them. This should be the first mission of the new task force created by Gov. Christine Gregoire. (For more on this issue, be sure to check out Scott Hamilton’s analysis.)

Even if the Northwest loses its competitive edge in jet manufacturing workforce, we’ve still got one last ace to play, says Sell: “It’s the same thing we did with the 787—we asked them ‘what do you need?’ We knew what Boeing needed much better than anybody else then, and that’s what we need to do now.

“It would be pretty foolish to think that not maintaining our industrial base is something we shouldn’t worry about,” Sell continued, in comments I quoted for a story in the May edition of Seattle Business Monthly. “We should, but once again, Boeing has every reason to stay here and not much reason to leave.”

That’s because lower supply means higher demand, and of course higher demand means higher prices, which is good news for all my former wheat-country homies from Touchet to Tekoa.

But this week’s USDA forecast on the winter wheat crop threw a curveball to everyone with a combine — while U.S. production is down, globally, there will be more wheat harvested this year than at any time in humanity’s history. That’s going to keep the supply-demand equation — and prices — down.

The silver lining is that prices for the soft white wheat we grow here in the Northwest remain around$5.70 a bushel, which means that most growers would still turn a profit of 55 or 60 cents a bushel over the average cost of production.

All this is good news for everybody who eats, of course. As I noted in this post for BNet.com, lower wheat prices will take some of the sting out of the increased prices for corn and soy beans that USDA projects for this year.