OKLAHOMA CITY — Aerospace giant Boeing on Wednesday broke ground on an $80 million facility to add to the company’s Oklahoma City corporate campus.

The building has room for more than 800 workers and is scheduled to open in 2016, when it will become the headquarters of Boeing’s department of aircraft modernization and sustainment.

Leanne Caret, president of Boeing’s global services and support, said the 290,000 square foot facility will overhaul and modernize out-of-production aircraft models in Boeing’s fleet and feature a state-of-the-art research laboratory. Because of the highly technical work required for this purpose, the facility will create hundreds of jobs for aerospace engineers in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said morethan 120,000 Oklahomans are currently employed in the aerospace industry. She said she was excited to bring more business to the region, calling it “a huge deal for Oklahoma.” Fallin added that Oklahoma was already home to the world’s largest aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul facility (American Airlines’ facility in Tulsa).

Last year, Fallin extended Oklahoma’s aerospace engineering tax credit, which provides a tax credit to aerospace companies on the salaries of newly hired engineers, until 2018.

Earlier this year, Boeing relocated about 900 engineering jobs from Washington to Oklahoma City for a $6 million tax subsidy.

Fallin said the tax credit was very attractive to engineers and their families.

“(The tax credit) builds life for workers and their families,” Fallin said.

Jeb Boatman, Boeing’s Oklahoma City site director, said Boeing pays more than $150 million to 145 Oklahoma-based suppliers, while Boeing employees have contributed morethan 6,000 hours to Oklahoma-based charities. 

Boatman said that Boeing, now nearing its 100th anniversary in 2016, has made Oklahoma City its center of defense and modernization research.

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett was glad to diversify the state’s economy, saying it would help avoid a recession similar to the one that struck the state in the 1980s, when the oil industry, which then accounted for over 20 percent of Oklahoma’s income, crashed and devastated Oklahoma’s economy.

While Cornett acknowledged that the state may still be dependent on the oil industry’s well-being, he said that the growth of aerospace industry in Oklahoma would help mitigate the effects of a future crash.

“This is the start of something really, really big,” Cornett said.