END OF B-1B BOMBER PROGRAM TO LEAVE VOID; BOEING TO SHUT DOWN SITE, TRANSFER UNIT'S WORKERS AS AIR FORCE CONSOLIDATES.Byline: Jim Skeen Daily News Staff Writer An era will end Wednesday with the departure of the last B-1B bomber bomber Military aircraft designed to drop bombs on surface targets. Aerial bombardment can be traced to the Italo-Turkish War (1911), in which an Italian pilot dropped grenades on two Turkish targets. to be serviced at Air Force Plant 42, concluding a maintenance and modification effort that employed more than 400 workers. Palmdale, where the B-1Bs were built from 1982 through 1988 by a work force that at its peak topped 7,500, is losing the airplanes to an Air Force initiative to consolidate maintenance work at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Boeing will close its B-1B site and shift workers to other programs. It was not known Wednesday how many workers might be laid off. ``Most of them have found somewhere else in Boeing to go,'' said company spokesman Mike Matthews Michael Scott Matthews is a Major League Baseball pitcher who was born on October 24, 1973 in Woodbridge, Virginia. Matthews pitched a single season at Montgomery Junior College in Rockville, Maryland in 1992 before being drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the second round . Boeing announced in March its plans to close out the B-1 work. The company will close Site 9, its B-1B bomber plant located at Avenue P and 30th Street East, and consolidate work from there at neighboring neigh·bor n. 1. One who lives near or next to another. 2. A person, place, or thing adjacent to or located near another. 3. A fellow human. 4. Used as a form of familiar address. v. Air Force Plant 42's Site 1. Site 1 is where Boeing modifies the space shuttle space shuttle, reusable U.S. space vehicle. Developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), it consists of a winged orbiter, two solid-rocket boosters, and an external tank. fleet and it is being used for the assembly of the company's joint strike fighter A strike fighter is a fighter aircraft which is also capable of attacking surface targets, including ships. It differs from an attack aircraft in that the aircraft remains a capable fighter. prototype. The company also plans to use the site for assembling any future experimental aircraft. The move is part of a Boeing plan to cut 8,200 jobs nationwide for the 238,000-employee aerospace behemoth behemoth (bē`hĭmŏth, bĭhē`–) [Heb.,=plural of beast], large, fanciful primeval monster, like Leviathan, evoking the hippopotamus mentioned in the Book of Job. . The B-1 work at Palmdale is ending as the result of a changing maintenance schedule. In the past, the Air Force maintenance schedule called for overhauling the 93-plane fleet over four years. Under that schedule, Tinker was not able to handle all of the aircraft, which meant four to five airplanes would be sent to Palmdale each year. Now the Air Force is going with a maintenance schedule of doing all 93 aircraft over a five-year period, making sending planes to Palmdale unnecessary. |
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