Saturday, November 1, 2008

Aviation Centers and museums

The former Grumman facilities at Bethpage

Richard Aboulafia wrote a great piece on his web site describing how aviation centers have disappeared and provides a convincing story of how commercial aircarft manufacturing can disappear from the Seattle area.

He uses the Long Island region (where I live) as an example. All that's left from Long Island's aviation tradition are a few museums and dilapidated buildings like the one's in Bethpage, NY. I live a couple miles away from Grumman's former industrial campus (in Bethpage) that and there is another one few miles away at Republic Airport in Farmingdale, NY which was the factory site of Republic Aircraft which built the P-47, F-105 and the A-10. There's a small museum there now. Will the IAM (and SPEEA) turn Everett and Renton into aviation museums. Looks like they've started that process. Read Richard's article here.

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