Reprinted from The Charleston Mercury, November 19, 2009

The recent announcement by Boeing that they will build a 787 Dreamliner production facility here is a “dream” come true with multiple implications for us.

Much has happened since the open letter to Governor Sanford that I published here in The Charleston Mercury about the need to pursue Boeing as if nothing else in the world mattered. So, before we look to the future, let us catch up of those whirlwinds days surrounding the announcement:

Boeing announced that they intend to invest at least $750 million and create at least 3,800 direct Boeing jobs over the next several years at a new, massive Boeing facility to be located near the Charleston International airport.

Immediately following the announcement, if you listen closely, you could hear collective shouts of joy from all across South Carolina. And, if you listened a little more closely, you could hear a collective moan of anguish and pain from Seattle.

While we here in South Carolina had welcomed a possible Boeing 787 facility with our famous hospitality, many folks in Seattle had decided to harp on the perceived negatives that Boeing would face by selecting the Charleston region.

There is no way the most-polite region in the country could talk badly about the competing Seattle region. So we focused on a positive approach, which accentuated the many great characteristics that our region offers. That approach won Boeing over.

From our perspective, South Carolina has landed a monumental trophy from its economic development efforts. The bad news is we only bag one of these “economic elephants” maybe every 20 years, which makes sustainable growth in the global marketplace a challenge.

So we need to dream while considering the many positives and opportunities that come with Boeing, such as: The effort to land Boeing here in the Charleston area was a collective effort of Governor Sanford and his team at the Department of Commerce, along with regional economic development leaders such as David Ginn, and, very importantly, our legislative leaders, especially Speaker Harrell and Senators McConnell and Leatherman.

The governor and the legislators proved that they can and will work together in times of great need for our state and the superlative effort of cooperation will hopefully be repeated several times in the coming legislative session and throughout Governor Sanford’s final year in office.

In the past several months, I have called on Governor Sanford to focus on what matters most to us right now — economic development and jobs. This is no time to rest on our laurels, so I still call on the state's chief executive to answer the call for more high-wage, knowledge-based jobs during the remainder of his term.

Our governor is a very eloquent individual and needs to be the No. 1 salesman of our great state. Unfortunately his message of restructuring government and other needed improvements in our state has been drowned out by the noise of strategic errors and miscues. Nonetheless, we now can seize the Boeing moment to pursue opportunities to raise our per-capita income level in South Carolina closer to the national average.

Our governor and our legislators need to work together very closely to land the many Boeing suppliers and many other companies that have taken notice of the Charleston region and of South Carolina because of our success with Boeing. Which leads us to this point: Landing Boeing is merely a start, not a finish. 

In two very eloquent pieces published on November 3 and November 9, my friend John Warner spoke through his www.swampfox.ws Web site about the need to take the success of landing Boeing and use it to focus on innovation, entrepreneurs and high-impact companies.

John writes that to make a truly transformative economic development impact, we need to use Boeing to get on the front end of innovation, to create an epicenter, a cluster of aerospace innovation and research.

John’s point is that, while manufacturing of the type that Boeing will be doing is very good, the real success will be in the creation of innovative companies around Boeing based on research and the creation of an innovative cultural center here in the Charleston region.

Our economic development officials need to leverage this recruiting success and obtain the design work and true cutting-edge innovation that will get us involved in cutting-edge aviation and aerospace.

In much the same way the landing of BMW two decades ago led to the establishment of the BMW Research Center near Clemson, Boeing can have a similar effect on creating an internationally-recognized research, design and development center here.

Let’s dream for a minute: Why don’t we work in a public-private partnership to create the Boeing-Aeronautical Institute of Research (Boeing-AIR)? Let’s establish a major aeronautical research institute here that will be a force in the future of aviation research, design and development.

Boeing-AIR could be located across International Boulevard from the Boeing facility. With many acres of land available, we could create something very similar to Clemson and BMW’s CU-ICAR, which is the renowned automotive research center blossoming along 1-85 in the Upstate.

We would position Boeing-AIR to become a leading international center for aviation and aeronautical research. If we act quickly, the AIR facility might open not long after Boeing opens its 787 production facility. Maybe our three research universities, with public and private funding, could join in and help make this a reality.

By combining Boeing’s presence here with our incredible quality of life, we could create an atmosphere that attracts many of the greatest minds in the aviation/aeronautical research and design world to South Carolina.

We could establish an incredible innovation culture here. Think about the ability to research, innovate and then engineer and build world-class aircraft, all within a one-half mile radius of our airport.

We have this opportunity due to the collective efforts of so many people, as I have mentioned previously. We can establish a hugely important research and development center in the midst of our aviation cluster that will lead to the higher-paying jobs that we want to create.

The time is now. The opportunity is here. Let's work together and build Boeing-AIR.

Logo Downloads