Little Fear of Flight : Long Beach Remains Calm Despite Latest Talk of a McDonnell Departure

The news that McDonnell Douglas, Long Beach’s largest employer, may take a lot of its new business elsewhere didn’t really surprise George Waller, a retiree who worked for more than three decades with the company.

“We have had a lot of stormy times in Long Beach. . . . This is about the third time Douglas has said they’re going to go,” observed Waller, 77, who went to work at the Long Beach plant in 1943 and stayed there until he retired in 1975.

Accustomed to the yo-yo-like cycle of hiring and layoffs in the aerospace industry, Long Beach reacted with calm concern Tuesday to word that McDonnell will probably not expand its operation in the city and likely will look for a state with fewer environmental restrictions and a lower cost of living for a site to build a new $750-million assembly plant to produce its next generation of passenger jetliner, the MD-12X.

“We’ve heard so many things about McDonnell in the last couple of years,” said Pamela Andrews of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. “Some of it’s true and some of it’s not. So I don’t think anybody is panicking.”

At the sprawling McDonnell plant in north-central Long Beach, many workers hadn’t even heard that the company probably would not bring the MD-12X project to Long Beach. Those who had were too busy building airplanes to start worrying.

“It’s a problem, but it’s too far away to deal with,” was the way George Vasquez, an aircraft mechanic for five years, put it.

“We work in cycles in the aerospace industry and we know that,” said Tim Saner, a senior human resource administrator for the company. “I’ve been in this for 10 years and I’ve been laid off three times from three different companies.”

Others interpreted the news as a management ploy during contract negotiations, pointing to investments the company has recently made in Long Beach to keep up with a backlog of orders for new aircraft. “I can’t see a company spending all this money doing this and then pulling everything,” said Randy Semroska, a shop steward for Local 148 of the union that represents plant workers.

Opened in 1940 by Douglas Aircraft, the plant lured thousands to Long Beach, helping to transform it from a sleepy satellite of Los Angeles to the fifth-largest city in the state. Empty fields were covered with houses for the new workers and the aircraft industry worked its way into the city’s identity, along with oil and shipbuilding.

But even though McDonnell now employs 37,000 people in Long Beach, making it the largest aircraft plant in the state, the company is in some ways no longer the dominant presence it once was in the city. Instead of walking to their shifts from nearby neighborhoods, many workers now commute from Orange County and more distant places, where the housing is cheaper. A McDonnell spokesman estimated that less than 10% of the plant’s workers live in Long Beach.

Residential neighborhoods near the 415-acre plant complain about the traffic congestion and aircraft noise it produces, leaving the city with something of a love-hate relationship with its biggest employer.

Still, few would want to see the company go.

“We care a great deal about it. McDonnell Douglas is an extremely valuable part of our community,” said Andrews of the Chamber of Commerce. The company pays property taxes and patronizes everything from local catering trucks to florists and small manufacturing suppliers.