Southern California says goodbye to commercial airplane production

From the article Californian aviation comes in for a landing by Gary Gentile, Associated Press, April 27, 2006 (published in The Washinton Times):

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- The last Boeing 717 has left the factory.

The slender airliner, trailed by dozens of the workers who built it, was rolled out before dawn last week and towed across a boulevard to Long Beach Airport.

Its delivery to AirTran Airways next month will mark the end of seven decades of commercial airplane production in Southern California.

At another sprawling complex nearby, thousands of workers produce the Boeing C-17 military cargo plane. However, no new orders for the aircraft are in the proposed Defense Department budget.

If congressional efforts to restore the program fail, the last of those flying warehouses will be delivered in 2008, and all airplane production would end in California -- once the center of commercial and military airplane construction in the nation.

"More aviation history has been made in Southern California than in any other place in the world," said Bill Schoneberger, author of "California Wings," a history of aviation in the state.

"But we've evolved. The aeronautics industry has moved from an airplane business into a systems business," he said...

Read the rest of the article

California Wings: A History of Aviation in the Golden State by William A. Schoneberger and Paul Sonnenburg (American Historical Press, 1984) isn't available new at Barnes & Noble these days, but there are some used copies there, if you're interested.