There's also a photo gallery of pictures of the last and first (N717XA) plane. Go to http://www.presstelegram.com and scroll down to the Photo Gallery box. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_3616859 End of the Line for Boeing 717 By Felix Sanchez, Staff writer LONG BEACH ? The party was over and the lights were being turned off. Ron Henson was standing in a corner of one of California's landmark airplane production hangars just off Lakewood Boulevard. For 36 years, Henson rode a bus in from Lakewood paying 45 cents each way to put in a day's work first for the McDonnell Douglas Corp. and then the Boeing Co. On this day, there were no whirring echoes of machine-drilling Rosie the Riveters ringing in his memory. Instead Henson had a hollow feeling for the fast-emptying, now cavernous factory and for what it once was: a hangar built in 1941 by Douglas Aircraft Co. where legions of workers assembled more than 15,000 of the most well-known military and commercial passenger planes in the world. But like the blue collar pro that he is, and that his uncle Julius Henson was decades before in the same factory, Ron Henson didn't just shove the now useless tools of his aircraft aside and wait for the inevitable. Tediously and with pride, the 65-year-old Henson made sure all the intricate pieces he's used over the years to forge together 717 passenger plane after 717 passenger plane were accounted for and safely stored away. Henson cleaned, polished and then slipped each hand tooling into its cushioned spot and then slid the thin shelves into their metal storage cabinet. Their job was over. As so was Henson's after 35 years. At least in this factory with the "Fly Douglas Jets" neon sign still sitting proudly atop it. At least for this plane. The last one With little public fanfare earlier this winter, the Boeing Co. in Long Beach began writing the final chapter in the storied history of commercial plane production in California by starting final assembly of its 717 passenger plane model. When this final, 156th 717 plane is completed in late April or early May, it and the second-to-last 717 assembled, plane No. 155, will be given a ceremonial double delivery to the last two customers to buy the planes: Midwest Express Airlines and AirTran Airways. Boeing's last 717 is now nearly 70 percent completed. Work began in mid-October, first on the wing sections. Then the plane's major fuselage pieces, pre-assembled, were joined together in early December. The wings were attached later. In early February, the final journey to completion started when the 717 was placed on the factory's innovative moving assembly line, a process shunned at one time by plane manufacturers but that has since been copied by other companies after the 717's success. Last week, as the plane moved along in barely perceptible tugs, the first of its two Rolls Royce engines were hoisted into place by a five-man team led by veteran 717 mechanic Mark Baggetta. The second will be bolted onto the 717 fuselage this week. "It's starting to hit home," Baggetta said after he'd guided the engine onto its three securing "gold bolts" using a 10-ton capacity crane and wi nch assembly suspended from the hangar's roof. For 12 months, since Boeing announced in January 2005 that the program would end, the atmosphere inside the 717 hangar has bonded workers into a close-knit family. A series of layoffs beginning in 2000 and leading up to the closing announcement already had depleted the work force by 1,200 people, and now, whenever someone left for vacation, or was off sick, you knew they were not around, Baggetta said. That familiarity is making it harder to see people depart as their individual jobs on the 717 are completed. People like Henson, who is among a big group of 717 workers who are able to transfer to the Boeing C-17 program as part of their collective bargaining agreement with the United Aerospace Workers of America Local 148. "You see all your friends leave. It's kind of emotional for everyone," Baggetta said. 717 widely praised The 717 is almost universally praised by airlines. Its flyability, pilots say, is unsurpassed. Passengers love the single aisle, two-seat, three-seat comfort. And one of the key industry stats used to evaluate a plane, dispatch reliability, is above 99 percent. That means the plane doesn't have the mechanical glitches or operations problems that keep it from leaving within 15 minutes of the scheduled departure from a gate, which means time and money saved by the airlines. All of which baffles workers when they hear that Boeing couldn't sell the plane. And angered many when Boeing decided to shut down the 717 line after trying since 2001 to stir more interest among airlines to buy more of them. Many 717 workers believe the 717 was doomed the day the Boeing Co. bought and merged with the McDonnell Douglas Corp., which created the MD-95 plane to try to capture the 100-seat, short haul market that its analysts said was ripe for growth, and that became the 717 after the companies merged in 1997. There was no way Boeing would aggressively sell the 717 when anyone could see it would be competitive with Boeing's star of the family, the 737. Mike Boyd, an airline industry analyst with The Boyd Group in Evergreen, Colo., believes the 717 was always a difficult sell for Boeing. And the company was never fully committed to it either, he said. After the merger with McDonnell-Douglas, Boeing only kept the 717 going "to keep some politicians happy," Boyd said. For Baggetta and other workers, they were convinced the last rivet had been driven into the 717's coffin when the 717 was shunted off to the side at the Paris Air Show, away from the other shiny new models in Boeing's line of passenger planes it was hawking to potential new buyers. "They didn't market it like they should have. People were asking, why isn't the 717 there?" Baggetta said. The beginning It was July 1994 when Douglas Aircraft Co. said it wanted to offer up a new, smaller commercial jet to airlines to see if any were interested. The plane was designed for short haul, high frequency routes under 1,500 miles. Based on the enthusiastic response, Douglas, a division of St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas Corp. said it would produce the 100-passenger MD-95, the "airbus of the future." The MD-95 would be about the same size as the company's original DC-9, and Douglas decided to use the fuselage of the trusty, highly successful DC-9 for the new plane but with updates to the engines, improved electrical, hydraulic and flight-control systems and a redesigned interior. Douglas secured an order for 50 of the planes, at $20 million apiece, from launch customer AirTran Airways, formerly ValuJet Airlines. And when McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merged, Boeing committed in early 1998 to building even more of the planes, renamed the Boeing 717-200. The decision was greeted with fanfare and excitement among rank-and-file workers. There were already 20,000 workers in Long Beach tied to Boeing and former Douglas plane production facilities, and the 717 was expected to have its own work force of up to 1,200 by the time full-scale production began in 1999. Boeing said the demand for planes the size of the 717 ? with a seating capacity of 100 passengers was nearly limitless, up to 2,500 planes over the next 20 years. They could sell anywhere from 800 to 2,000 717s, in fact. Turns out it was a "mirage market," Boeing vice president and 717 general manager Patrick McKenna says now. "Every year we would look out and see the forecasts for growth, but it kept moving away from us," McKenna said. The mirage was in full effect, though, in 1999. "It's great news," Mike Conklin, a structure mechanic on the 717, told reporters at the time. "I hope we sell a lot more." Boeing was only able to sell and build 156.