The future of one of the St. Louis region's most important assembly lines could depend on the next 60 days.
Boeing's Super Hornets are in the final months of an international jet fighter sweepstakes, on the cusp of wooing Canada and Finland into multibillion-dollar deals. The orders could keep thousands of workers busy through the end of the decade.
The new work can't come fast enough. The U.S. Navy is looking to curtail Super Hornet orders after more than two decades of support, leaving Boeing with a gap between current orders and those to come. At the same time, the company needs the Super Hornet to drive development of new fighters, a competition pitting the nation's aerospace giants in a race to the next generation of aerial warfare — contracts that could keep assembly lines like those here in St. Louis humming for decades.
