Print edition: 
Thanks are due Gov. Sam Brownback for devoting his first economic summit last week to asking the question for the city and Sedgwick County: What is it going to take to keep and build Wichita’s reputation as Air Capital of the World? The answer, which he mentioned again in his Friday news conference in Topeka, is that the community and state must assume an “offensive position” toward recruiting aviation companies, suppliers and jobs.
Playing defense can work, as when leaders used incentives last year to fight off Louisiana’s efforts to lure away Hawker Beechcraft.
But it’s better to head off the wouldbe poachers in ways that try to ensure that aircraft manufacturers’ decisions will go Wichita’s way.
Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, took from the aviation summit a confirmation of the importance of “good and forward-looking” tax and regulatory policies. “You have to have folks want to invest here,” he told The Eagle editorial board.
Pompeo noted how Los Angeles used to be among the nine cities known for building airplanes. Only Wichita and four other U.S. cities have maintained that industry’s manufacturing base.
He will help at the federal level as he can, Pompeo said, but “earmarks are gone” with the debt crisis and he now has a limited ability to secure funds for key local projects such as Wichita State University’s National Institute for Aviation Research and Sedgwick County’s National Center for Aviation Training.
In the ongoing 2012 budget negotiations and beyond, leaders should continue to push for NIAR and NCAT funding at the state level. Both institutions are invaluable assets, signaling that Wichita not only wants to be the place where airplanes are built but where the future of aviation is forged. Action on other areas could boost Wichita’s aviation sector: „ The Legislature should pass the University Engineering Initiative Act, which would use Kansas Lottery money to help WSU, the University of Kansas and Kansas State University boost the number of engineering graduates in the state to 1,365 a year by 2021. As Spirit AeroSystems CEO Jeff Turner said at the aviation summit, a business needs “people, product and capital,” and Spirit and other companies are facing a shortage of engineers.
„ The Air Force should favor Hawker Beechcraft, and not Brazil’s Embraer, with the pending contract to produce fighter aircraft. The same arguments that won the $35 billion air-tanker contract for Boeing apply here: The job of building light attack planes should go to Hawker because it can provide far more jobs to Americans (1,400 jobs in 20 states), including perhaps 800 in Wichita, than its foreign competitor.
The summit also highlighted the need for more international marketing and trade missions and agreements, and the importance of affordable commercial airfares in and out of Wichita. With so many other communities and countries offering aggressive incentives to companies, Kansas also needs its own set of economic development tools and a savvy strategy for using them.
As Pompeo said, “We have this unbelievable jewel here.”
It must be the unified mission of Pompeo, Brownback and every other leader to ensure that jewel remains not only polished but right where it is.
— For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman
