Norman D. Dicks: “I was a very strong proponent of the C-17 even when Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach was building this airplane. I had a…”

“I was a very strong proponent of the C-17 even when Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach was building this airplane. I had a chance to go there when they were doing the wooden mock-ups and when they brought in the load masters, who made it such that the plane was built in a way that it could load cargo faster than any other airplane in history. We have 54 of these at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the great State of Washington. We are very proud of the C-17. It is now built by the Boeing Company. I just want you to know that we are a very strong proponent. We had some great work done in the nineties in upgrading the software when we had major software issues. We also had a dramatic workforce out there that really used all of the tools of lean production. So the C-17 is a very high priority, and we will certainly do everything we can. I wish we'd built more of them, frankly, while we had the line open, but we did everything we could. We are at a point now where the line is closing down except for foreign sales. We have a number of foreign sales; and if at some point we need to come back to it, I certainly would be open to that. {time} 1520”