The end of an era in Long Beach
THE HANGARS are intimidating and massive from the outside. But inside, the activity is so scarce you can hear your voice echo. It wasn’t always this way for the aircraft factories at Long Beach Airport. Since opening in 1941, this facility has twice come near permanent closure, only to be saved by corporate mergers. This time, though, Long Beach’s iconic Boeing plant probably won’t get its miracle.
Boeing announced Friday that it had finally seen the writing on the wall -- the company will wind down production of the C-17 aircraft because the Pentagon won’t commit to ordering any more. Assembly of the military cargo jet, the last big plane manufactured in Southern California, will probably end in 2009. Despite a strong lobbying effort to save the assembly line and its 5,500 jobs, Congress has refused to set aside the billions of dollars needed to make the Pentagon change its mind.
For those of us who grew up here, it’s an idea that would have seemed impossible two decades ago: In three years’ time, no more big jets will be built in the Southland.
In March, I toured the Long Beach factories to see the last locally produced commercial jet make its way down the assembly line. The 110-seat Boeing 717, inherited from the company’s 1997 purchase of McDonnell-Douglas, occupied just a tiny patch of the hangar’s seemingly endless floor.
The rest of the massive building was dark and quiet. On the floor were trolley lines for planes and bike paths with stop signs where they intersect, a testament to the factory’s bustling, long-vanished heyday. Over a raised platform, hundreds of yards from the plane, hung a bell that used to be rung when a new order was phoned in. It has been silent since 2004.
Not too far from the 717 building was a fenced-off lot on which a hangar was recently bulldozed to make way for homes and offices. At the height of World War II, these factories churned out a plane every two hours and employed about 50,000 workers. The Long Beach facility saw thousands of DC-3s, a legendary 1940s workhorse, roll off its assembly line. At the peak of Cold War production, more than 100,000 Southern Californians worked in airplane manufacturing alone.
Growing up in Glendale, I often heard kids my age brag that their parents helped build planes in Burbank, probably at Lockheed’s ultra-secret Skunk Works plant near the airport (that factory moved to Palmdale in 1989). It seemed as if everyone in Los Angeles had a friend or relative who worked in aerospace. Now, the old buildings, where they exist, look and feel like giant sarcophagi.
The silver lining in this great collapse is that the world is no longer on the brink of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, a threat that fueled generations’ worth of good aerospace jobs. Still, as an aviation nerd, it was a somber experience to visit the Long Beach factories and see what’s left of a once-proud industry.
I couldn’t make it to Long Beach in May when the last 717 took off on its delivery flight to AirTran Airways. But I plan to save the date in 2009 to bid farewell not only to the final C-17 coming off the line, but to a long, important and, I hope, not forgotten chapter in the Southland’s history.
