Chelsea Heights, planned as a 78-unit condo project near Tacoma’s Wright Park, will join Prium Companies’ Hanna Heights as an apartment project when it debuts this spring.

The project at Sixth Avenue and J Streets is yet another victim of slowing condominium sales in downtown Tacoma and nationwide.

Chelsea Heights

Nearly 3,500 condominiums are available or planned in the downtown Tacoma market, according to a recent study by Tacoma real estate consultant J.J. McCament.

“With the downturn in the condo market, we have determined that it is our

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Portac, Inc., a lumber mill in Tacoma’s Tideflats, is closing.

Gary Takahashi, the company’s president, said Thursday that the mill is laying off its remaining 71 workers and will begin to shut down in February.

It’s been a tough year for the company.

Last spring, Portac laid off about 50 people due to a shortage of logs to mill. The company mills large-sized logs into products such as beams and garage headers.

Takahashi said then that there was a shortage of large logs from nearby areas, such as Morton and Lewis County,

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Air Canada is experimenting with the next step in do-it-yourself check-ins with kiosks that spit out luggage tags for passengers to apply to their own bags.

The new tags are available at Air Canada check-in facilities in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

Air Canada isn’t the only pioneer in self-tagging. SeaTac-based Alaska Airlines tried and rejected passenger-applied luggage tags in its “Airport of the Future” design in Anchorage.

Alaska executives said passengers had no reluctance to printing their own boarding passes, but balked at printing and applying their own baggage tags.

They apparently feared they’d do it

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Flights leaving Sea-Tac Airport this morning were generally leaving on time despite storm conditions in Chicago, Denver, Kansas City and St. Louis.

Those iffy weather conditions and pilot shortages have forced cancellations of hundreds of flights this holiday season nationwide particularly at United Airlines. United cancelled 168 flights nationwide Thursday.

This morning’s Sea-Tac stats show only one flight cancelled in the 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. time period, a United 8:21 a.m. flight to Denver. Other flights to Chicago and Boston were running late.

For the latest airport arrival and departure times, check Flightstats.com.

Just a reminder: The state’s minimum wage will increases 14 cents to $8.07 an hour starting on Jan. 1.

Washington’s minimum wage applies to workers in both agriculture and non-agricultural jobs, although 14- and 15-year-olds may be paid 85 percent of the adult minimum wage, or $6.86 an hour.

Each year, the Department of Labor and Industries recalculates the state’s minimum wage as required by Initiative 688, which Washington voters approved in 1998. The initiative requires the state to adjust the minimum wage according to the change in a national index covering the cost of goods and

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One of Boeing’s biggest 787 Dreamliner customers, Air India, is asking the company to compensate it for the delayed delivery of its first few aircraft.

Boeing says it is expecting to deliver the first 787 to Air India five months late.

Boeing originally had planned to deliver its first 787 to launch customer All Nippon Airways in May next year. But Boeing delayed that delivery by six months after problems developed in the new global network of plants building major sections of the new jet.

Air India is third in line to receive the 787.It was to

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United Airlines has cancelled more than 600 flights during the critical holiday period, many of those flights going through the airline’s Chicago hub.

But United’s pilots’ union says the root cause was not so much the weather as it is the airline’s too lean roster of pilots.

The airline was forced to cancel flights because it had used its corps of pilots to fill in on flights earlier in the month when the weather delayed those flights and “timed out” the pilots originally scheduled to handle the flights. Federal rules limit pilots’ duty hours.

“The weather

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Another shipping line is leaving the Port of Seattle to come to Tacoma.

MOL – Mitsui O.S.K. Lines – ships are scheduled to call at Washington United Terminals docks in Tacoma next month, said Tara Hazarian, Port of Tacoma spokeswoman.

The Japanese shipping line currently calls at Terminal 5 in Seattle. That terminal is operated by Eagle Marine Services, a subsidiary of APL.

The Seattle PI reports that MOL was “frustrated waiting for APL to expand Terminal 5 by adding another berth and a couple of cranes, as its current lease with the Port of Seattle.

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