End Of An Aviation Era

The last commercial transport has rolled off the assembly line in southern California. There’s still a large aerospace industry there, but no more manufacturing, at least for transports.

Very few of the facilities that were built during the war to build airplanes still do so, if they exist at all. I remember when I worked in Downey at the old Consolidated-Vultee (which later became Convair) plant that was later purchased by North American (and became the space division during Apollo), you could still walk out in the back parking lot and see the lines from the old runway where the “Valiants” and other aircraft would roll out of the factory and take off over the dairy farms and orange groves. It’s all suburbia now, and the plant is being converted to film studios and other uses.