Boeing Co

Prospects are brightening for Boeing Co.'s once-threatened C-17 aircraft factory in Long Beach, where 5,000 workers could find themselves employed for several more years -- if not longer. The factory is home to the last major airplane production line left in Southern California. For decades, the region was the nation's bastion of aircraft manufacturing, with plants from Burbank to San Diego rolling out planes hourly.

Boeing Co. won an Air Force award that is valued at as much as $2.02 billion to replace cracking wings on aging A-10 antitank aircraft, beating larger rival Lockheed Martin Corp.

Boeing Co. won a contract from the Pentagon to modify a small unmanned aircraft to enable the plane to detect chemical and biological weapons. The two-year, $8.2-million program will equip two ScanEagle unmanned planes, now being used by the Navy and Marines, with sensors capable of remotely detecting the presence of biological agents before a target is attacked by military forces, Boeing said.

Boeing Co., the largest private contractor to the U.S. space program, said it would join Northrop Grumman Corp. in bidding for a contract to develop NASA's next manned spacecraft, which could carry people to the moon and Mars. The contract for the so-called crew exploration vehicle will be the largest awarded by NASA in the next five years, worth as much as $5 billion through 2010.

The competition for the Pentagon's biggest contract in years intensified Monday as European aircraft maker Airbus said it would assemble commercial jets in the U.S. if it won the $40 -billion award to build aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force. The announcement marks the latest effort by Airbus and its partner Century City-based Northrop Grumman Corp. to upset rival Boeing Co. to build the planes that would be used to refuel fighters and bombers in midair.

The state's top environmental officer Tuesday asked federal officials for more time to decide if California should back an effort to make Boeing's Santa Susana Field Laboratory a Superfund cleanup site. Linda S. Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said the state might be better positioned to make Boeing more quickly remove the rocket fuel and nuclear test contamination that was left at the site near Chatsworth.

Boeing Co., citing unresolved production problems, said Wednesday that it would be unable to deliver its first 787 Dreamliner passenger plane until early 2009 -- more than nine months later than it had promised airlines. The latest holdup marks another embarrassing setback for Boeing, which had insisted even as recently as last month that there would be no further delays after having pushed back delivery of the first 787 by six months in October.

Two key Boeing Co. defense executives have been quietly transferred to the troubled 787 jetliner program, suggesting that problems with developing the plane could be worse than the company has revealed. In what some analysts said was an unusual move, the two executives were placed on "special assignment" with the commercial aircraft division in Seattle in early January, two weeks before Boeing announced that production problems had forced a further delay in initial deliveries of the Dreamliner.

The Justice Department on Monday announced the indictment and arrest of a longtime aerospace worker in Southern California for allegedly passing classified documents to China in an elaborate espionage endeavor that spanned two decades and exposed trade secrets from the space shuttle, the Delta IV rocket and the C-17 military transport aircraft. Dongfan Chung, 72, a native of China who became a naturalized U.S.

Boeing Co. said Friday that it would seriously consider challenging a U.S. Air Force decision to give a $40-billion aerial tanker program to a team that includes its European archrival Airbus. After receiving an Air Force briefing on the victory of Century City-based Northrop Grumman Corp.