Not that I'm jumping the gun here, but should Boeing announce the shuttering of its C-17 program in Long Beach tomorrow, it will truly be the end of an era - the aerospace era in Southern California. The industry dates back to the early 1900s and has included the likes of Howard Hughes, Jack Northrop and Donald Douglas. As with the movies, weather drew the fledgling business out here because year-round flying was possible. A lot of the analyses will trace the slide in local aerospace to the end of the Cold War - and that's true to some extent - but there's also been a transformation over the years from building planes to developing electronic warfare systems. Here's one of numerous overviews on the industry, noting that by the 1990s, Boeing, with its massive commercial division and successful designs, was about the only aerospace company not substantially dependent on government contracts for its survival. Expect lots of coverage in Saturday's papers if the C-17 is shut down.