Wichita scored another big win with Wednesday’s announcement that Spirit AeroSystems will build the fuselage of the Cessna Citation Columbus in a new 375,000-square-foot factory in Wichita. Spirit estimates that the project and other new programs will create about 700 jobs. The final assembly of the airplane will be done by Cessna at its planned new plant in Wichita.
These new plants could have been built almost anywhere, and other states offer generous incentives to lure the work away. Kudos to the aircraft companies and to city, county and state officials for keeping this work in Kansas.
8 Comments
Good news.
Good work by the city’s find-new-jobs folks.
Also means that ICT is tied even further to the aviation industry, despite all the mostly talk over the years about widening the economic base.
Wichitans build airplanes. Multiply all the thousands of aero workers by, what is it, 3, and realize that without airplanes, we’d be another Hutchinson.
Dennis
I’m not clear as to why Cessna isn’t building this aircraft themselves. Granted it is a wide body design, but would that why? I would presume they think this method will be cheaper, but I don’t follow that logic. ??
That is 700 new jobs at Spirit…and how many new jobs at Cessna? Very positive investment by the state, city and county on this one.
Gster, my guess; to build in house, Cessna would have needed to add the workers Spirit is adding, and likely, given the wide body design, would need to build additional facilities and acquire new machinery to construct the fuselage “in house”. To do so, I would think this would delay production schedules. In other words, contracting it out to Spirit is less expensive, and allows production to begin more quickly.
“gster
Posted August 28, 2008 at 9:52 am | Permalink
I’m not clear as to why Cessna isn’t building this aircraft themselves. Granted it is a wide body design, but would that why? I would presume they think this method will be cheaper, but I don’t follow that logic. ??”
economy of scale… same logic used to decide that P&W should make the engines and Rockwell should make the avionics.
BTW Cessna will still do the assembly, so they will really ‘build’ the aircraft
VT- That’s what I thought might be driving this decision. Thanks
It’s not over for Spirit. Next is the Gulfstream 650. :)
honestly loved bumping into your blog post!!