A little more than a year ago, comparisons of the self-proclaimed "Air Capital of the World" with such a potent symbol of industrial decline were far from the minds of most business and civic leaders in Wichita. Demand was at an all-time high for the business jets, turboprops and Boeing 737 fuselages being churned out of factories in this city of 364,000, the largest in Kansas. As companies scrambled to fill openings, engineering students at Wichita State University were virtually guaranteed well-paying jobs when they graduated. "Wichita's aircraft industry has hit an all-time hot streak, selling out production on some models for years to come," the Wichita Eagle, the region's daily newspaper, wrote in June 2008.

Even when the global credit crisis hit three months later, there were still hopes the industry would be shielded by record backlogs and global orders that had made it less reliant on the U.S. economy. As the National Business Aviation Assn. (NBAA) convention opened in Orlando, Fla., in October 2008, aircraft manufacturers were telling their suppliers to expect no cuts in production rates. A Honeywell forecaster opined that the credit crisis's impact on the industry would be "a short-term blip."

Then it all came crashing down, with a suddenness and severity that no executives had foreseen, even in their worst-case models. Unable to secure financing, huge numbers of buyers deferred delivery or abandoned their deposits and walked away. Meanwhile, new orders slowed to a trickle as a global recession intensified and politicians in Washington, including President Barack Obama, attacked the use of private jets as a symbol of corporate excess (see p. 58).

In less than a year, Wichita's three business jet producers--Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier's Learjet--have shed about 12,000 jobs, or nearly 30% of the local aerospace workforce, and watched billions of dollars of backlog vanish. Only Spirit AeroSystems--an aerostructures manufacturer that relies on production of large passenger jets built by Boeing--has been able to avoid layoffs.

"It is as bad as I've ever seen it for that industry, and I've been doing this for 34 years," says Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Assn. of Machinists (IAM). "In September 2008 we had 9,000 openings in Wichita for machinists, aircraft-certified welders, avionics electricians and aircraft sheet metal people. And today we have 11,000 [union member] layoffs. That's a shift of 20,000 jobs right there."

And nobody is quite sure how many more jobs have been lost at suppliers and other businesses down the food chain. Nordam, for example, has cut more than three-quarters of the positions at a Wichita facility that supplies business jet cabinetry. "There are an awful lot of small shops and companies that were completely dependent on the aerospace industry that are going to go by the wayside or get consolidated," says Cessna Chairman, CEO and President Jack Pelton.

The carnage is almost certain to continue into 2010, albeit at a slower pace. Honeywell now predicts deliveries will bottom out at 40-45% below their 2008 peak and will not reach that level again until 2017 (see p. 61). And when they do, Wichita's business aircraft manufacturers will be facing another challenge--an onslaught from lower-cost overseas competitors. Notable among these is Brazil's Embraer, an experienced aircraft producer that is aiming to shatter price-versus-value expectations with its line of light, medium and large executive jets.

But do all these factors make Wichita the next Detroit? A visit to the front line of the business aviation industry's meltdown certainly does not reveal any striking similarities between the two cities. Wichita is not full of abandoned factories, crumbling houses or other signs of urban blight. Unemployment insurance has helped keep large numbers of workers from fleeing the city. And while the jobless rate of 9.7% is the worst this region has seen in years, it is on par with the national average and nowhere near Detroit's 28.9% unemployment rate. Wichita's share of the business turbine-aircraft market has been declining since the mid-1990s. Aircraft executives fear Embraer's challenge could exacerbate the slide.

"You still have trouble getting a table in our restaurants," say Mayor Carl Brewer. "Our hotels are full. People are still shopping."

But some worrying parallels emerge if Wichita is compared with the Detroit of the early 1970s. Today's Wichita and yesterday's Motor City are the centers of dominant U.S. industries that prospered for decades with little foreign competition. Both have endured strikes by heavily unionized workforces. And both face the arrival of low-cost competitors that are disrupting long-held business models. Wichita's share of the business turbine aircraft market already has slid to 51% in 2008 from a peak of 74% in the mid-1990s, according to an analysis of delivery data from the General Aviation Manufacturers Assn.