Wichita ? In the city’s beleaguered aviation community, the decision by Boeing Co.’s commercial airplane business to get out of town could be just the thing to keep the industry’s slow recovery moving along.

Aviation workers across Wichita were still digesting Wednesday the news that Chicago-based Boeing, following through on plans announced more than a year ago, had sold its commercial aviation plants in Kansas and Oklahoma to Onex Corp., creating what the Canadian investment group called the world’s largest independent aerostructures firm.

Onex hopes to boost production at the Boeing plants, which are now operating at half of their capacity. And as an independent, the new company will be able to build aircraft parts for both Boeing and other airplane makers, including Airbus SAS, the company’s chief rival in the passenger jet business.

“We consider doing business with just about anybody that makes quality aircraft parts at economic prices,” said Mary Anne Greczyn, a spokeswoman for Airbus North America. “Airbus has a whole bunch of U.S. companies with which we do business each year. We come to the U.S. because they are top quality and they fit in with our business plan.”

The Boeing sale comes as the aviation industry, devastated by an economic downturn made much worse by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, appears to be slowly recovering in Wichita. During that recession, 15,000 aviation workers in Wichita, including 5,000 at Boeing, lost their jobs.

Onex executives pledged Tuesday to invest $1 billion in its new plants, located in Wichita and Tulsa and McAlester, Okla., and “confidently” predicted it would reverse the job losses of the past several years. Meanwhile, Boeing is keeping its defense businesses in Wichita, which employs 5,000.

Other aviation manufacturers in Wichita, notably Cessna Aircraft Co., also are confident the business is turning around. Cessna plans to add several hundred jobs at its plants in Wichita and south-central Kansas this year.

“It is a very cyclical industry — right now we are expecting we will have a strong, solid rest of the decade,” said Jessica Myers, Cessna spokeswoman. “The industry is moving upwards right now.”

For Boeing, that means focusing on design and final assembly, leaving the development of components and other aircraft pieces to others. That strategic decision led to Tuesday’s sale.

Under the deal, Onex gets long-term agreements to build for Boeing parts such as the fuselage sections and wing elements on four of its existing planes and the new 787 Dreamliner, the company’s next-generation commercial jet. The Dreamliner will make extensive use of lightweight carbon graphite composites.

John Tomblin, the executive director of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University, said the Wichita site’s experience with composites also would draw business from other aircraft makers. And in general, few companies in the world can do the work of the magnitude Onex will be able perform in Wichita.

“Anytime you can market yourself to other industries, it is a good thing,” Tomblin said. “What it does is allow some of the technology that is happening within Wichita to be marketed to other regions of the world.”