In 1971, a now-iconic billboard was placed on the edge of town that read: “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE — Turn out the lights.”

The Supersonic Transport (SST) project had just been canceled by the federal government. Thousands of Boeing workers were laid off. The aerospace boom went bust, and Seattle fell into one of its cyclical spirals of hand-wringing and reinvention.

That history constitutes one of the main timelines in my novel Supersonic. Although Boeing is never named in the book, “America’s Preeminent Aerospace Company” is very much a gravitational force in the story, warping the lives of ordinary people and shaping the collective mythos of the city.

Much of the book’s 1971 timeline is grounded in the star-crossed romance between Larry Dugdale, a disgraced Navy seaman turned junior aerospace machinist, and Ruth Hasegawa, an earnest teacher-in-training yearning for something beyond the future her mother has scripted for her (a script that definitely did not include any Larry-Iike romantic leads).

Larry pins his sense of personal worth and his hopes with Ruth on the promise of the SST, a futuristic jetliner that would fly at nearly Mach 3, revolutionizing the possibilities of global travel. “He is going to be somebody,” the novel insists, “and play his part in something huge and make sure that Ruth knows all about it.”

Of course, he isn’t. And he doesn’t. The SST project never flew a single flight. It was never even built, unless you count a balsa wood model. And with its quite literal failure to launch, the city’s economy and technological dreams were grounded (for the foreseeable future) along with Larry’s vision of a brighter, better self with Ruth.

From the Archives

Fast forward fifty-some years, and here we are again: The lights are still on in Seattle. But the Boeing leviathan is again stumbling about, wreaking collateral damage. Federal investigations. Whistleblowers. Missing bolts. Door panels flying off at 16,000 feet. Factory slowdowns. Leadership shakeups. I didn’t intend to write about contemporary issues in Supersonic, but it seems that we’ve found ourselves in the sequel no one asked for.

Local Books
Seattle Met Book Club

May 20, 5pm at University Book Store

Join the Seattle Met book club in person for a conversation with author Thomas Kohnstamm.

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In Seattle, we’ve always had a codependent relationship with Boeing. Elation when it soars, existential dread when it falls, betrayal when it threatens to take up with a new family in South Carolina or Chicago. That mix of civic pride and optimism, stretched over a scaffolding of abandonment issues, hasn’t changed in decades.

To me, the problem isn’t “America’s Preeminent Aerospace Company” itself—it’s that we keep hitching and re-hitching our future to corporate giants that pretend to be family until the share price drops and the mask inevitably slips. Now, at least, we have a rotation of like three or four mercurial stepdads instead of just one. I imagine some future novelist will find a darkly comic storyline about the whole HQ2 bait and switch.