Seattle, despite decades of being tightly bound to Boeing, has never elected a mayor who worked at the company.

Wichita, Kan., has such a mayor now. And his anger occasionally got the better of his restraint Wednesday at a news conference about Boeing's decision to shutter its remaining 2,160-employee defense plant in his town.

"We thought we had a marriage," said Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, who until his 2007 election was a business manager at Spirit AeroSystems, the airplane-manufacturing operation sold off by Boeing two years earlier.

"It's taken a lot of work for us to control our outrage," he said. "So don't ask me... are you outraged, because the answer will be yes, with probably another four-letter word attached to it."

Kansas politicians feel particularly "angry and disappointed and dismayed," as one county commissioner put it, because they led the Republican flank of the decadelong congressional push to secure the $35 billion Air Force tanker contract for Boeing.

In return they were told the company and its suppliers would generate 7,500 direct and indirect jobs after Boeing clinched the contract last February.

"We as a community demonstrated our loyalty to the Boeing Company when they asked us to stand behind them and to go fight for them," Brewer said.

Now he's singing a different tune. "Don't think for one second that we are not exploring our opportunities to go out and recruit Airbus... We are making those phone calls."

Boeing's decision let some of the air out of the self-described Air Capital of the World. But Wichita still has Spirit, with some 10,000 employees, as well as Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier Learjet, which build everything from business jets to single-prop aircraft at large factories there.

Airbus opened its U.S. engineering headquarters there 10 years ago and now has close to 300 employees.

Seattle gained a few jobs in Boeing's realignment of its defense work — 200 jobs coming here from Wichita, while 100 Seattle jobs are shifted elsewhere. The bigger winners, though, were Oklahoma City and San Antonio, Texas, where nonunion facilities will get up to 1,400 jobs now done by Wichita's unionized workers.

In that light, the Machinists' recent deal with Boeing — requiring any tanker jobs removed from Wichita to come to Seattle — doesn't look like much of a union victory.

Mayor Brewer could have been speaking for Seattle when he said about Wichita's aviation industry, "Everybody in the United States, everybody in the world, is wanting either all of it or a piece of it."

The Puget Sound region may be fortunate that before making its decision, Boeing reportedly didn't consult with Kansas officials and give them any opportunity to negotiate. After losing several thousand general-aviation jobs in the recession, Kansas has proved its willingness to hold on to the rest on a pay-to-play basis.

In mid-2010 Bombardier Learjet agreed to assemble its new composite Learjet 85 business jet in Wichita and to keep existing operations there after obtaining $27 million in bond financing from Kansas, according to The Wichita Eagle newspaper.

Later that year Hawker Beechcraft, which employs about 6,000 in Wichita, won a $45 million incentive package from state, county and city officials after Louisiana offered hundreds of millions of dollars to relocate the operations to Baton Rouge, The Eagle reported.

Boeing's rationale for closing its Wichita defense plant was essentially that it lacked critical mass — many of the programs it served were shrinking, and the tanker-completion work to be done there would be too costly if it stood alone.

But there's a larger message, too. Boeing said it will move 1,400 to 1,600 jobs, a reduction of one-quarter or more from the workforce of the Wichita plant it's closing by the end of 2013.

Such consolidation could be just a glimpse of the defense sector's future in a time of shrinking Pentagon budgets. And though Boeing's defense-side operations around the Puget Sound area gained some work in this round, what happened in Wichita should sound a cautionary note here as well.

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