A company that’s a major supplier of composite material to Boeing will celebrate two decades in Pierce County May 25 at its U.S. headquarters in Frederickson.

Toray Composites (America) Inc. furnishes carbon fiber prepeg to Boeing and manufacturers of composite products ranging from hockey sticks to automobiles. Carbon fiber prepreg is a tape-like material composed of carbon fibers embedded in a polymer. The tape is used in layers to produce lightweight, high strength aerospace parts or sports equipment when it is cured in large ovens called autoclaves.

Boeing produces vertical tails for 787 Dreamliners and vertical and horizontal tails of …

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The Foremost Dairy building, recently renovated by Seattle-based American Life Inc., has earned a LEED Gold certification, according to a news release this morning.

LEED is a voluntary and rigorous certification program that rates design, construction and operation of “green” buildings. According to the release from Freiheit & Ho Architects, the Foremost building, at 2415 Pacific Ave., “achieved LEED certification for efficiency in energy, lighting, water and material use, as well as incorporating a variety of other sustainable strategies.”

The Foremost building now houses Social Security offices on the second floor, with ground-floor retail space available.

The LEED certification is one …

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Phone service that was interrupted early this morning by an equipment failure was restored about 1:30 p.m. today in Gig Harbor and the Kitsap Peninsula

Century Link spokeswoman Jan Kampbell said a failure of a piece of equipment provided by a third-party vendor caused the outage.

Service was restored when a spare part was procured and installed, she said.

Phone service was disrupted beginning about 4:30 a.m. to an unknown number of customers. The service disruption was intermittent. Not all customers in the area were affected, she said.

Electronics giant Best Buy said today it will close 50 of its big box electronics retail stores and shift to a business model emphasizing smaller stores selling cell phones, tablets and e-readers.

The company didn’t issue a list of stores intended for closure. Those closures are scheduled to happen before the end of the year. Best Buy will also trim its corporate staff by 400 positions. In the South Sound, Best Buy has big box stores in Tacoma, Federal Way, Puyallup, Tukwila, Lacey and Olympia.

Those moves and others are designed to save the company $800 million. That new …

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Boeing’s Washington payroll, propelled by production pace increases and new aircraft development projects, grew by nearly 9,000 workers since the end of 2010 hitting at level that hasn’t been equaled in more than a dozen years.

The company reports it employed 82,325 workers in Washington at the end of last month. That compares with 73,617 Washington employees the company reported just 14 months ago.

Company-wide, the lion’s share of Boeing’s hiring in that period was in Washington, where its commercial airplane production and design work is centered. Of the 11,155 Boeing added to its payrolls nationwide since the end of …

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Of the dozens of companies represented Friday at a technology conference in downtown Tacoma, truck manufacturing giant Paccar seemed an outlier.

It owns truck businesses you have heard of: Kenworth. Peterbilt. It’s a 105-year-old global company based in Washington with $16 billion in sales and revenues.

One of the ways their engineers make new equipment is using software that, after hitting “print”, prompts another machine to produce a three-dimensional part. If the part doesn’t work, they can print another.

Paccar hired 8,000 people last year.

“We’re the biggest technology company you’ve never heard of,” Gary Whisler, Paccar recruiter, told …

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Chinese customers will buy about 200 of Boeing’s new 737 Max airliners this year despite competition from a new Chinese-made airliner of the same size, says Boeing’s commercial airplane chief.

Jim Albaugh in an interview with Bloomberg News, said he expects the re-engined and improved version of the best-selling single-aisle jetliner will attract at least 200 orders in 2012 from Chinese airlines. The Max will be built in Boeing’s Renton plant.

The 737 Max is competing with Airbus’s re-engined A320, the A320neo, and China’s own Comac C919. The C919 is a twin-engine, single-aisle plane in the same 150-to-190 passenger …

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Boeing has delivered the first production version of the U.S. Navy’s new surveillance and submarine hunting aircraft, the P-8A Poseidon.

The P-8A is a militarized version of Boeing’s 737-800 airliner equipped with advance sensors and weapons to detect and destroy submarines.

It will replace the P-3 Orion in the Navy’s inventory of aircraft. The plane delivered Sunday is the first of 13 low-production rate aircraft. The company has already delivered
six flight-test aircraft and two ground test planes to the Navy.

Following delivery in Seattle, Navy pilots flew the first production P-8A, to

…

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