There was a time when it was weird a plane someone was flying on wasn’t built in California, such is no longer the case. After being a massive producer of airplanes and massive driver of the aviation industry, California is officially out of the commercial and military airplane building business with the last Boeing C-17 flying away from the Long Beach facility yesterday. Companies like Douglas, Lockheed, and more were based there. When tensions were highest during the cold war 15 of the 25 biggest aviation companies in America were located in California. Oh how times have changed. Boeing was down to 400 employees at the Long Beach facility when the last plane left. Yes, they maintain employees in the state but those are not the employees assembling planes. Sad stuff.
Back in the late 1980s, one in four jobs in aerospace was based in California. By the mid-1990s with governmental cut backs on military spending, California’s flying heart got ripped out of its chest while still beating. The loss of lots of good paying jobs actually caused SoCal to suffer longer during the recession years of the 1990s and those jobs never came back. The C-17 was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak situation but with the end of that program with nearly 250 aircraft in the service of the USA and many hundreds more sold around the world, there is but a flicker of life left.
Boeing is still a global leader in all forms of aviation and the US continues to be an innovator in the field but in many ways it has now completely abandoned a place that was for all intents and purposes its ancestral home. Yes, Kitty Hawk was first but when the industry was cranking during its salad years, Southern California was the place where the ideas, the products, and the innovation were happening.
Sadly, there were probably glasses clinking in celebration somewhere in California with the knowledge that this era had ended. We’ll stop there.
Click here for the full story regarding the end of Boeing C-17 production in California
Since the people who rule our fine state just don’t see any glamour in basic things like manufacturing (and them damn old-timey conservatives who tend to run it), they’ve let it become near-impossible and it all moves on to lower-cost, lower-hassle areas. Good for those states that have been willing to back it.
I can see it now, commiefornia running off all of the jobs and start raising property taxes dramatically on citizens to make up for the shortfall of revenue. The libtard’s just don’t understand nearly like they think they do.
When you make arguments using stupid attempts at insult like libtards and commiefornia do you really think it makes you appear smarter? How about giving some actual though to what you post instead of idiocy?
Ram50boosted is 100% right.
Very unoriginal, very uncool, even by the low standards of YouTube, much less here.
Production would have ended several years ago, but US senators to California, Boxer and Feinstein forced the Pentagon to buy more C-17’s than they wanted to in order to keep the plant open. The Boeing employees thank you was to go on strike a few weeks later.