Boeing Is Closing an Era in Aviation

Boeing Co. said Friday that it would shut the last production line making commercial jetliners in Southern California, marking the end of an era for a region once synonymous with the manufacture of aircraft.

After the last of Boeing’s slow-selling 717s is delivered next year, the company will close one of its giant Long Beach factories.

The move should have only a modest economic effect. Most of the 300 assembly line workers at the plant will be transferred to other union jobs at another Boeing factory in Long Beach that builds C-17 transports for the military. Less clear is the fate of 500 salaried employees.

An additional 1,700 employees at the factory overhaul and maintain Boeing-built aircraft. They are expected to retain their jobs.

“It’s obviously a sad day for California and for Long Beach in particular,” said Long Beach City Councilman Dan Baker. “I hate to see it go ... because we’re losing a big part of our history.”

The Long Beach plant was opened in 1941 by Douglas Aircraft -- it still has a large lighted “Fly DC Jets” sign out front -- and the plant thrived for decades. It produced some of the world’s most popular airliners, including the DC-3, DC-7, DC-8 and DC-10. At one point, there was so much work in the sprawling plant that workers used bicycles to get from one end to the other.

Now, the factory will join a long list of shuttered aircraft assembly plants, which have left industrial pockmarks from San Diego to Palmdale.

Boeing made the decision to shutter the 717 line after an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to secure additional orders.

The company inherited the program when it acquired McDonnell Douglas Corp. in 1997. But the twin-engine, single-aisle aircraft, which seats 106 passengers, never caught on with the big airlines.

And when air travel slowed significantly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, orders dwindled to a trickle -- even though, analysts said, Boeing slashed the price of the 717 to $25 million from $35 million.

On the factory floor, workers are given the honor of ringing a 2-foot bell atop a balcony whenever a new order comes in. Of late, the bell has rarely sounded. Last year, the company received only eight orders for the 717.

In all, Boeing has sold 155 of the planes. It has 18 left to build.

“The decision was a difficult one ... but the tough reality is that many airlines that would benefit from our airplane are not in a financial position to order the 717,” Patrick C. McKenna, general manager for the program, said in a letter to employees.

William Schultz, president of United Auto Workers Local 148, which represents the 300 factory-floor workers, was glum after Boeing delivered the news: “It’s devastating.”

At one time, the Long Beach complex was part of Southern California’s golden era of aviation, as pioneers including Donald Douglas, Jack Northrop and Howard Hughes took advantage of the temperate weather to test out their new flying machines.

Each built companies that bore their names, and they blossomed. Eventually, their outsize dreams helped fuel the rise of middle-class communities across Southern California, including Lakewood, which abuts the Long Beach factory.

“When the times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong,” Joan Didion wrote in her 2003 book “Where I Was From.”

In Burbank, Lockheed Corp. produced airliners such as the Constellation and the Electra. In San Diego, General Dynamics Corp. made Convair passenger planes. And at the Long Beach plant, more than 40,000 people built MD-80 jetliners through the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, a steady stream of military aircraft also came off local assembly lines.

But the end of the Cold War -- and the rise of European jetliner maker Airbus -- led to massive job losses and a succession of corporate mergers throughout the U.S. aerospace industry.

Today, local aerospace manufacturing employment stands at about 40,000, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. That’s down about three-quarters from its peak in the late 1980s.

What’s more, the focus has shifted from airplanes. In recent years, the industry has concentrated instead on military research and development, with engineers designing spy satellites, precision missiles and other high-tech weaponry.

After the final 717 rolls off the line, the C-17 will be the last big aircraft assembled in California. The only other large-scale nonmilitary work left in the state will be that of Robinson Helicopter, which has a factory in Torrance. Fuselages for the Boeing 747 were long made in Hawthorne, but that work has been significantly scaled back of late.

Boeing told Wall Street that the closing of the 717 line, along with certain costs associated with a controversial Air Force aerial tanker program, would result in a pretax write-off of $615 million. Analysts said the charges could erase most of Boeing’s profit for the last quarter.

Linda McConnell, a 20-year veteran of the McDonnell Douglas and Boeing operations, said that though she and other employees were upset by the closure of the 717 line, they understood Boeing’s decision: “I like to be a realist. The company had no choice but to do it like this.”

William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, agreed that there was little hope of keeping the plant open given the way work there had “been dwindling for decades.” Nonetheless, he added, “this is a milestone moment.”

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End of an era

Boeing’s plan to end production in Long Beach of the 717 ends a long history of commercial aircraft assembly in Southern California. A great deal of satellite and military aerospace work is still done here.

1916: Brothers Allan and Malcolm Loughhead form Loughhead Aircraft Manufacturing -- later to become Lockheed -- in Santa Barbara.

1920: Donald Douglas establishes the company that will become McDonnell Douglas behind a Los Angeles barber shop.

1932: Hughes Aircraft is established in Glendale to develop planes for Howard Hughes’ hobby -- speed flying.

1939: Jack Northrop founds Northrop Aircraft in Hawthorne. Los Angeles had wanted the company, but the city of Hawthorne lured it away by building a mile-long airfield that Jack Northrop would later turn over to the city, which eventually turned it into Hawthorne Municipal Airport.

1940: Aviation accounts for more than half of the manufacturing workers in the Los Angeles area.

World War II: Aerospace employment in Southern California skyrockets. More people work at Burbank’s Lockheed plants than live in the city. Lockheed builds nearly 20,000 planes for the military. At peak production in 1944, according to census data, half of all civilian employees in Los Angeles County work for aerospace firms. At its peak during World War II, the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach churns out one C-47 military cargo plane every two hours. By war’s end, the facility has produced 15,000 aircraft.

1947: Howard Hughes’ $25-million Spruce Goose makes its only flight, across Long Beach harbor.

1950s: After a postwar slump, the aerospace business booms again. Companies such as TRW, Aerojet, Rocketdyne and Litton join earlier regional aircraft stalwarts to make Southern California the aerospace capital of the world. Aerospace growth spurs establishment of communities such as Lakewood, which becomes known as the “instant city” for going from bean fields in 1950 to the 17th-largest city in the state by 1954. Norwalk, Artesia and Bellflower similarly boom.

1960s: The growing aerospace industry spreads to Orange County. Douglas Aircraft, Hughes Aircraft, Ford Aerospace and North American Rockwell all build facilities in the county or expand existing ones. From 1960 to 1970, the number of aerospace workers in Orange County grows from 22,000 to 62,000.

1986: Employment in the industry peaks; Southern California is home to 290,000 aerospace employees.

1988: Lockheed closes a factory in Watts.

1992: McDonnell Douglas Corp. announces that it will close its Torrance aircraft parts manufacturing plant, eliminating 2,000 jobs.

1994: Northrop Corp. buys Grumman Corp. for $2.2 billion. Lockheed Corp. and Martin Marietta Corp. announce an agreement to merge through a stock swap valued at $10 billion.

1996: Boeing Co. buys most of the space and defense operations of Rockwell International Corp.

1997: Boeing acquires McDonnell Douglas.

1999: Boeing shutters the former Rockwell plant in Downey.

2000: Aerospace employment in Southern California has dwindled to 117,000.

Feb 22, 2001: Last McDonnell Douglas plane is delivered.

Jan. 14: Boeing announces that it will end production of the 717, the last commercial jetliner built in Southern California.

Compiled by Times research librarian Scott Wilson

Times staff writer Wendy Thermos contributed to this report.