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
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