Story: Boeing’s C-17 Globemaster plane leaves Long Beach, leaving economic crater in its wake
When: Nov. 29, 2015
What happened: When Boeing’s last C-17 Globemaster, a transport plane, flew away from Long Beach, it also carried off one of Long Beach’s biggest economic drivers and a long-held source of pride for the city.
Over the course of two decades, thousands of workers at two massive plants on Wardlow Road, in Long Beach — as well as at a Huntington Beach location — helped build more than 250 of the behemoths.
But over the years, orders dried up. In 2013, the last C-17 for the U.S. Air Force left Long Beach. Only a last-minute foreign order from India preserved some 4,000 jobs — at least until that order finished in the third quarter of 2014.
In November 2015, the final C-17 left Long Beach, with 1,000 people cheering it goodbye.
About 2,200 lost their Long Beach jobs, though many retired or transferred to other plants.
And to this day, the C-17 plants on Wardlow remain largely vacant. Long Beach then spent years trying to figure out a way to redevelop the area and spending federal grant money to retrain former Globemaster workers.
The city currently has a Globemaster Corridor Specific Plan in the works. And earlier this year, it got some major news: Boeing agreed to sell the 93-acre plot that once housed C-17 production to Goodman Group, an Australian property development firm, for more than $200 million.
Tentative plans for the site, officials have said, include a mix of commercial and industrial uses.
