Hiring has begun
About 1,250 people work at Spirit’s facility in Tulsa, said Bill Brown, senior vice president of Oklahoma operations.
“It says we’re going to do future work here,” he said of Spirit’s new McAlester commitment. “This will do a lot of 737 work, also Airbus work. So it’s not just Boeing work.
“We’re already started hiring people off the street. We’re getting them out of the local tech schools. We’re training them. We teaching them how to come into entrylevel jobs. People who are really skilled are coming into these jobs. It’s a great way to people to progress not only in skill but in pay raise.”
Spirit AeroSystems designs and builds aerostructures for commercial and defense customers. The McAlester facility, which includes 139,629 square feet over three manufacturing buildings, has orders to produce more than 1,000 unique part numbers for customers.
Gentile said Spirit was a $600 million business last year and could reach the $680 million mark in 2018.
“At Spirit, we’ve decided that fabrication is going to be one of our core growth strategies,” he said. “We want to make it a $1 billion business. This Threeand Four-Axis Center of Excellence here in McAlester is a core part of that strategy.”
Among those Gentile and others at Spirit thanked Wednesday were the United Aerospace Workers union, employees and Gov. Mary Fallin, whose backing of the aerospace industry, they said, was instrumental in McAlester’s getting the center.
A total of 216,000 people in Oklahoma are employed in the aerospace industry, Fallin said. All told, aviation and aerospace businesses in the state generate $43.7 billion annually in economic activity, according to the Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission report released last year, making aviation and aerospace the second-largest economic engine in the state behind oil and gas.
“Why does that matter?” Fallin said. “It matters because when Spirit AeroSystems is looking for a different locations to be able to invest, expand and grow jobs and bring stateof-the-art equipment like this, they know that Oklahoma has a skilled, educated workforce, which is very important. We’re very, very proud of that.”