Wichita ? Located 1,000 feet off the centerline of the main runway at Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, the massive Cessna Citation Service Center dwarfs the city’s airport terminal.

Cessna Aircraft Co. officials love to brag about it.

Built at a cost of $61 million, the 443,000-square-foot structure is the biggest building between Kansas City and Denver. The two-story building is five-and-a-half times the size of a football field.

But in a city hit hard by the downturn in the aviation industry, most folks are interested in another kind of number: the 500 new jobs the center will bring to Wichita in the next three to five years.

They’re also interested in these numbers: 200 to 300, the number of new jobs created when the current Citation service facility in Wichita becomes a finishing facility for the company’s newly certified Sovereign planes. And 600, the number of new jobs companywide Cessna expects to hire next year amid a recovering market for business jets.

The gleaming new building and rosy employment outlook, even if the jobs only number in the hundreds, stand in stark contrast to Nov. 7, 2001, the day Cessna officials announced plans to build the Citation center.

It was less than two months after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. By that time, the city’s other plane makers — Boeing Co., Raytheon Aircraft Co. and Bombardier Aerospace — had already announced the first of 7,000 layoffs in the aviation industry.

Thousands more layoffs loomed ahead: More than 12,000 Wichita aircraft workers would ultimately lose their jobs.

But in those dark economic days, Cessna officials told a skeptical community that at a time when other companies were holding off on expansions, the unit of Providence, R.I.-based Textron Inc. had chosen a different course of action.

A Cessna Citation business jet takes off Thursday in front of the new Cessna Citation Service Center at Mid-Continent Airport in Wichita. The 1 million, 443,000-square-foot facility will open later this month and service Citations worldwide.

Three years later, project manager Joel Davis stands on a walkway overlooking a cavernous service bay in the new service center — the biggest yet in the company’s network of 10 worldwide. Soon it would be filled with airplanes and the people who make a living maintaining them.

“That is Cessna’s past history,” Davis said of the decision to move ahead with the project. “We have always been leapfrogging the competition when times are bad.”

He proudly pointed down to the 60,000 square-foot hangar. It is the largest of the facility’s three maintenance hangars, which together are capable of servicing about 100 business jets a day.

The new service center boasts a total of five hangars, including a specially equipped paint area, avionics shop, hydraulic shop and four fuel farms. It also has 104,000 square feet of office space for company operations.

The company will begin moving its existing operations into the new facility Nov. 20, Davis said. Today, the first of 42 tractor-trailer loads arrives with new furniture.

Across the country, Cessna has more than doubled its hangar and office space this year to service the growing Citation fleet. Expansions in Wichita and a new center that opened earlier this year in Orlando, Fla., are valued at over $100 million, the company said.

“A lot of people like to come to Wichita because it is the factory — it’s like coming home,” Cessna spokeswoman Jessica Myers said.