A California aviation era ends

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The Boston Globe

A California aviation era ends

Last passenger aircraft rolls out of Boeing's Long Beach factory

By Associated Press | April 24, 2006

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- The last Boeing 717 has left the factory.

The slender airliner, trailed by dozens of the workers who built it, was rolled out before dawn last week and towed across a boulevard to Long Beach Airport.

Its delivery to AirTran Airways next month will mark the end of seven decades of commercial airplane production in Southern California.

At another sprawling complex nearby, thousands of workers still produce the Boeing C-17 military cargo plane. However, there are no new orders for the aircraft in the proposed Defense Department budget.

If congressional efforts to restore the program fail, the last of those flying warehouses will be delivered in 2008, and all airplane production would end in California -- once the center of commercial and military airplane construction in the nation.

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http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2006/04/24/a_california_aviation_era_ends/