After standing at home plate seemingly forever, Eastern North Carolina has finally hit one right out of the TransPark.

The announcement that a major aircraft component manufacturer will open a big new factory at the Global TransPark near Kinston is a home run, maybe a grand slam. It's some of the best news the economically struggling region has had in years, even if it carries a considerable pricetag in tax breaks and other incentives. Here at last is the realistic prospect of hundreds of good jobs in a future-oriented business.

On the receiving end of North Carolina's largess is Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan. The name may be unfamiliar but the business has a pedigree. Spirit, formed in 2005, includes the former commercial aviation portion of Boeing's once-huge Wichita operations. In Kinston, Spirit plans to invest over $500 million and eventually hire 1,000 employees.

In recent years the aircraft industry has become increasingly component-based, with plane parts large and small being built around the globe. Spirit builds components of Boeing airliners but also contracts with other makers. The TransPark plant will design and construct composite fuselage sections for Airbus, Boeing's European rival.

Composite means carbon fiber, the new wave in aircraft construction. Spirit has just won a contract to build a main section of the fuselage of Airbus' yet-to-fly A350 twin-engine widebody jet. Crafting such a component is cutting-edge manufacturing. A facility and workforce adept at it should have a good chance to land additional aircraft work.

Training will be key to developing such workers in a region not known for aircraft production or high tech (although the east is not as strictly agricultural it once was). To help out, the state is putting up $11 million for training, mostly through the community college system. That's a good use of a good system.

The $11 million is one of the smaller parts of an incentives package that could top $180 million. There are the now-usual tax credits and grants -- unfortunate, but probably essential to compete with other states and sensibly linked to the jobs actually created. Then the Spirit package breaks new ground with a $100 million -- you read that right -- transfer from the Golden LEAF Foundation to the TransPark Authority. The money will finance the new factory. The tenant will make "nominal" lease payments.

Golden LEAF, created in 1999, gets its money from the national tobacco lawsuit settlement. Its job is to revive tobacco-dependent areas. Typically its grants range in the tens of thousands of dollars to $2 million. In providing $100 million for a single project, Golden LEAF has made a bold bet.

That bet looks to be well-placed, all in all. Not only is the Spirit project a potential life-changer for hard-hit North Carolinians, it could touch off further expansion of the state's aircraft industry, already entrenched in Durham (GE's jet engine plant) and starting up in Greensboro-Alamance County (Honda's new small jet plane and engine). Having missed out on major automobile assembly plants, North Carolina is smart to encourage aircraft-related manufacturing.

Does this latest project fulfill the grandest hopes for the TransPark? Not yet -- for one thing, Spirit will rely on ocean shipping, not the Kinston facility's runway, to transport finished fuselage sections. But it's a big and welcome step nonetheless.