LYNNWOOD - Puget Sound's aerospace cluster has a formidable advantage over anyone who tries to elbow their way into the field, a leading aerospace analyst said Monday.

"Everyone who's tried to start a cluster has failed," Teal Group analyst Richard Aboulafia said. "There's such an advantage associated with experience and skills and being the incumbent provider."

But while this region may not have much to fear in terms of competition from new regions, it's still possible for it to fail, Aboulafia warned members of the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance.

The threat - tens of thousands of Baby Boomers will soon retire, taking decades of knowledge and experience.

"You can't emphasize education, training and mentoring enough," Aboulfia said. "It's the same dynamic of leveraging tribal knowledge within a company that preserves the advantage."

As a region, that means state and local governments must get involved, "not because they should, but because they have to," he said. "There's a lot to be said for government doing everything it can from a training standpoint and a logistics standpoint."

And for aerospace suppliers in Washington and Oregon, that means "what you see is what you get," Aboulafia said. "The customers you have are the customers you want to keep, because there are no new ones in town."

The greatest threats, he said, aren't emerging markets like China or Mexico, but southern U.S. states that don't have aerospace industries and are welling to dangle huge inducements to get them.

"There ought to be a WTO agreement within the United States," Aboulafia said. "The WTO may stop Indonesia from having a dumb industrial policy, but it can't stop New Mexico."

Aboulafia gave a comprehensive overview on the outlook for both civilian and military aviation. If you're interested, the Master of Sammamish, Leeham's Scott Hamilton has Richard's slide show posted online.

But the fun part of an Aboulafia presentation isn't his Powerpoints, it's his one-liners. Here's a sampling on Monday's hits:

• On Eclipse Aviation, the Colorado builder of very light jets - "I find it baffling and disturbing. I don't anticipate anything good coming from it, except for some rather unpleasant justice at the end of the day."

• On very light jets in general -- "If there's one thing I hate it's very light jets and air taxis. . . . "The greatest hot-air-to-action ratio - VLJs. . . . let's all buy one and keep them in the garage."

• On Airbus' A380 - "I believe it was launched by a rogue French trader."

• On Boeing's moves in the late '90s to cut R&D spending and give more money to shareholders - "They wanted to build new walk-in humidors."

• On the causes of Boeing's 787 delays and potential solutions - "You listen to six people and you get eight different opinions."

• On the prospects for sales of the Airbus A340 - "Eh, dead plane flying."