Greater OKC Region Aerospace Industry – 2025
Public Sector Aerospace Employment . State rankings for the private aerospace sector developed in the prior section confirm an upper middle-tier placement of Oklahoma’s aerospace market when viewed solely by its private sector component. Oklahoma generally ranks among the top half of states and matches or exceeds its expected rank based on population. Again, the concern with examining only private sector aerospace activity in Oklahoma is that it overlooks the state’s strong competitive position in public sector aerospace. In the Greater OKC region, public sector activity anchors the sector. Using only the private sector also fails to capture the natural synergies between the private and public sides of the industry. Many firms in the region are engaged in both private and public sector aerospace activities, and many of the activities underway at public sector aerospace entities are often functionally equivalent to those in the private sector. This includes transferable labor market skills, common infrastructure and equipment, and similar maintenance and repair activities. The role of public sector aerospace activity is often overlooked in other states as well. As in Oklahoma, this activity is most often tied to the mission of the Air Force and other military entities including the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve units. However, in Oklahoma and a few other states, it extends beyond military applications to the FAA and NASA and other federal aerospace-related entities. Defining Public Sector Aerospace In this section of the report, we develop measures of state-level public sector aerospace activity. The public sector estimates are then combined with the private sector rankings developed in the prior section to evaluate the overall size and composition of the combined aerospace sector in Oklahoma relative to other states. Public sector aerospace activity is measured using six distinct segments of the public sector workforce: 1. active-duty Air Force personnel 2. permanent civilian Air Force employees 3. Air Force reserve personnel 4. Air National Guard personnel 5. permanent civilian FAA employees, and 6. NASA personnel These six groups of public sector employees are directly and deeply involved in aerospace activities but are frequently excluded from state-level reviews of aerospace markets. Public Sector Aerospace – State-Level Figure 16 summarizes state-level employment in each of the six aerospace-related segments in fiscal year 2024. The six sectors are listed in order from largest to smallest by national employment, with active-duty Air Force personnel the largest group and NASA employees the smallest. The categories exclude some small amounts of aerospace employment in other branches of the Armed Forces. Across all five sectors, approximately 650,000 workers were employed nationally by public sector aerospace-related entities in fiscal year 2024, down about 1.5% from 660,000 in the 2020 aerospace report. For comparison, public sector aerospace workers are equivalent to almost half the 1.39 million workers reported in the private aerospace sectors.
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