LYNNWOOD — The Pacific Northwest is home to North America’s biggest cluster of aerospace companies — from small machine shops to the Boeing Co.
And plenty of regions would like to take that title, industry analyst Kevin Michaels told attendees Tuesday at the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance’s annual conference.
Aerospace companies here have to jump on local advantages to stay ahead of rising competitors such as the Southeast, said Michaels, a vice president at Fairfax, Virginia-based ICF International, a consulting firm.
“The competition isn’t between states, it isn’t between cities,” he said. It is between regions and their clusters of related companies.
Aerospace has rapidly expanded in recent years in the Southeast. Since 2011, three airplane makers have started assembling aircraft there: Boeing’s 787 line in South Carolina, Airbus’ A320 line in Alabama, and Embraer’s Phenom line in Florida.
In 2015, the auditing and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers ranked Florida as the most attractive state for aerospace manufacturing.
Two other Southeastern states — Georgia and Missouri — also cracked the top ten. Washington finished 12th.
The aerospace industry in metro Puget Sound directly employs more than 93,000 people. Add in the rest of the state, Idaho, Oregon and British Columbia, and the total is about 115,000 jobs.
Florida has more than 80,000 aerospace workers. Many of those jobs are related to the space program.
Connecticut-based aerospace supplier Kaman Aircraft Corp. has added more than 150 jobs there in recent years and has about 700 workers in the state.
“Florida is a great place to operate and grow a business,” Kaman CEO Neal Keating said last week. “We continue to look for opportunities to create jobs here in Jacksonville and across the state.”
Big suppliers and manufacturers who spent the last decade chasing low labor rates overseas are now moving work back to the U.S. and other developed countries, Michaels said.
“We’re moving away from the days of far-flung supply chains,” he said. Success will depend more on companies’ local supply chains.
Metro “Puget Sound has a reputation as being tough for doing business,” Michaels said.
But the region is leading in several other key industry characteristics, such as advanced manufacturing and composite structures production, he said.
Tens of thousands of aerospace workers here are approaching retirement age. Almost half of all Boeing workers in Washington will be eligible to retire by 2020. That includes as many as 9,000 engineers, said Alex Pietsch, associate vice president for Washington State University in Everett.
To help meet that “engineering talent crisis,” WSU is developing a new polytechnical institute that could open as soon as January 2017 in Everett, he said.
This year’s PNAA conference is focused on the industry’s future challenges and opportunities. More than 500 industry insiders attending the conference, which runs through Thursday.
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