Old Days

There was a notice in the Long Beach (California) Press-Telegram this past week regarding the completion and departure of the 223rd and last C-17 Globemaster III from the Boeing facility in that city. To most people, I suppose, it's probably just another example of factories closing and jobs being lost as companies leave Southern California for cheaper parts of the US, and business in general migrates to lower-cost options in other countries. And that's fair enough, really; unless you were there in the old days, it's a notice of no special interest. Boeing will still provide service, spares and support for the C-17 fleet, and if they bid successfully on future Air Force contracts they can build the airplanes somewhere else without any real effect on the company. If the company can't find anything else to use the Long Beach facility for it would be bad news for the people who work there - and for the economy in Southern California - but the ongoing survival of Boeing is probably a bigger business issue. It's just that I was there in the old days...

When I was kid growing up in Southern California there were no major Boeing plants in the area; the powerhouse companies in Los Angles County were McDonnell-Douglas, Hughes Aircraft, Northrop and TRW. The area had a long history with the aerospace industry - or, at least, as long a history as you can have with an industry that has existed for less than 60 years at that point. Douglas had been based in the Los Angeles area since before its merger with McDonnell Aircraft, and the facility in Long Beach had been building transport aircraft (including the celebrated Douglas Commercial or DC line) since before World War II. After I got home from college I applied for a job with McDonnell-Douglas and went for a series of interviews at the Long Beach facility; although I didn't get the job (a degree in English and a love of airplanes isn't really a good set of credentials for a Technical Writer) I lived for the next three years just a couple of miles away from the plant...

Now, I understand that it's a different world from the one I remember. The United States doesn't have the budget to just purchase whatever ships, tanks or airplanes we want anymore, and with the end of the Cold War and the corresponding drawdown in our armed forces we don't need as much hardware to begin with. The fact is that the scene in Long Beach has been repeated all over the US, and given the correspondingly smaller chance of being randomly vaporized one night, I don't suppose that the lowering of international tensions is a bad thing. But I do worry about the damage all of this is doing to the American aerospace industry, to communities like Long Beach, and to grand traditions like aerospace companies and innovative new aircraft coming out of Los Angeles County...

Almost a century ago the fledgling airplane comanies came to California for much the same reasons the movie studios had: the land was cheap, the weather conditions made it possible to work on projects outside for much of the year, and the final product could be sent east in a small metal film cannister - or, in the case of the airplanes, just fly away on its own. I know that in the long run it's more important for the US aerospace industry as a whole to prosper, and that as long as we have overall  economic stability and sufficient military defense it doesn't really matter if powerful and graceful flying machines are being built and then flown away from a factory in Long Beach...

But despite the fact that I live in Michigan now - or possibly because of that - I still miss the old days back in Long Beach...