EVERETT, Wash. -- A question about Boeing's 787 that's been unanswered for the last two years may finally have an answer.

An Australian newspaper said Boeing has told Qantas Airlines that the 787 Dreamliner will have its first flight before the end of this year.

The respected Web site Flightblogger.com said first flight will likely happen by late November or early December.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg is quoting Chief Financial Officer James Bell, in an internal Boeing memo, as saying that the Dreamliner's setbacks are "having a significant impact on our financial performance."

The Bloomberg article said Boeing has reduced travel costs by one third, and will keep cutting jobs this year.

It's unclear if that'll mean new layoffs, or a continuation of the ones the company has already announced.

Boeing is about halfway through 10,000 job cuts that were announced around the first of the year. About 500 60-day layoff notices company- wide will be issued Friday.

A little over half -- about 275 --will affect workers in the Puget Sound region. A total of 200 of those layoffs will be across the commercial airplane division.

The Dreamliner is already about two years late and counting. The latest issues to crop up were some small skin wrinkles in the body sections over and just behind the wing.

The other issue, a large one, is the unexpected weakness in the structure where the wing meets the body. That one delayed first flight indefinitely, just before its then-scheduled time at the end of June.

Despite those recent setbacks, the work aimed at the first flight continues. A test airplane, which Boeing refers to as "ZA-002" spent much of Thursday moving around the airport, doing taxi tests.