Boeing Leaving Wichita; Headed To San Antonio -- Air Force One -- Kelly AFB -- Nothing To Do With the Bakken

Link here.

Boeing said it will move all remaining work from its Wichita facility to other sites, officials told employees this morning.

The move will affect 2,100 workers in Wichita, and provide a huge economic blow to the city, surrounding communities and the state. Boeing has been part of the community for more than 80 years.

Boeing primarily does maintenance and modification of military and government work in Wichita, including work on presidential airlift programs, commonly known as Air Force One.

According to wiki, both Texas and Kansas are right-to-work states, so this should not be another NLRB / Seattle / South Carolina story, but something tells me the Boeing directors will be very careful how they talk about the move.

Boeing had long promised that Wichita would become a finishing center for a next-generation aerial refueling tanker should the company win a U.S. Air Force contract, worth $35 billion, to replace the current fleet of tankers. Boeing said winning the contract would mean 7,500 jobs for Kansas, including several hundred at Boeing Wichita. Boeing won the tanker bid last year.

In November, though, company officials said they were studying the future of the site. Closing the facility was one of the options, they said at the time.

U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo said last month that a Boeing official told him the tanker work would be going to the Seattle area and not to Wichita, and that work on Air Force One would move to San Antonio. 

The Kansas congressional delegation is not happy with this and will demand that Boeing live up to its promises, so we will see how this plays out.

Something tells me Boeing may have had some discussions with Leon Panetta's plans for cutting defense costs. At one time there were 24,000 Boeing employees in the Wichita area, and the decline in those numbers over the  years pretty much foretold the story.

One of the interesting things to come out of the air base closures some years ago was the "closure" of Kelly AFB. Yes, the base did "close" but it became a huge aerospace industrial park and, although it got off to a slow start, it was quite a major operation by the time I left the Air Force back in 2007.

I don't know if that is where Boeing is moving its Air Force One mission but my hunch it is. 

Which reminds me: someone sent me a comment in response to my post on Minot AFB which I did not post. The comment was so factually incorrect, it wasn't worth posting. My point was that the military bases that did not close will continue to grow, and it appears this is exactly what is happening, vis a vis Wichita vs San Antonio. And it's certainly happening at Minot.