Cleveland-based Eaton Corp.’s local aerospace operations are seeing more work than they have in years with plans to hire engineers and support staff in coming months, according to executives.
“We’re expecting to see a strong ramp-up in the next two to three years with the projects we’ve been adding to our pipeline,” said Bradley Morton, president of Eaton’s Irvine-based aerospace group.
Eaton has about 400 Orange County employees in Irvine and Costa Mesa, up about 60% from 2008.
The company is looking to fill about 25 local positions, according to executives.
The aerospace unit does about $1.6 billion in yearly sales. It builds cockpits and designs fueling devices for commercial and military jets.
The unit makes up about 13% of Eaton’s overall yearly revenue of $12 billion. Eaton also makes electrical power distribution and control equipment, truck parts, hydraulics for industrial uses and other products.
“Eaton has risen from a niche player in aerospace to a major diversified competitor,” said Eli Lustgarten, a New York-based analyst at Ohio’s Longbow Research LLC, which advises institutional investors. “And they’ve made sure not to become dependent on one or two big airplane manufacturers. They’ve been very deliberate with their growth strategy in aerospace.”
Customers
Customers include Boeing Co., Airbus SAS, Lockheed Martin Corp., United Technologies Corp., Brazil’s Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica SA, Canada’s Bombardier Inc., Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. of Georgia and Aviation Industry Corp. of China.
In Irvine, Eaton makes parts used in handling fuel for airplanes. That includes everything from creating nozzles and valves for refueling trucks to developing digital monitoring devices for transferring fuel between tanks while an airplane is in flight.
Eaton engineers have been taking those technologies and applying them to other markets where fuel leakage and spills are problems, such as with ships and trains, according to Keith Mayer, manager of Eaton’s plant in Irvine.
“Irvine and Orange County are benefitting as Eaton consolidates its acquisitions in aerospace and expands into other industries that can benefit from safer and more efficient methods of handling fuel,” he said.
In Costa Mesa, Eaton focuses on parts and equipment used in cockpits. Those include lighted instrument panels, switches and a variety of different control devices.
In House
Eaton used to outsource much of its assembly work and now does it on its own, according to Mike Smith, Costa Mesa plant manager.
The plant is winning bigger, more sophisticated projects since it can control production from design through testing and assembly, according to Smith.
“We’ve started to get entire cockpit orders now instead of assignments to build a panel or instrument one at a time,” he said.
That has helped Eaton’s cockpit business to expand overseas. The company’s plant in Costa Mesa now is working on creating cockpits for passenger commercial jets being made by Aviation Industry Corp. of China and Brazil’s Empresa.
Almost a quarter of the work done in Costa Mesa is related to military projects, according to Smith. One of those is designing and building cockpit instrumentation for the new Sikorsky CH-53K, a heavy lift helicopter from United Technologies.
“We’ve never had this much activity going on at any one time,” Smith said. “The sheer content we’re getting now is a huge opportunity.”
For now, the aerospace unit is dealing with the lingering effects of the slowdown in commercial aviation. For the fourth quarter, sales were down 15% from a year earlier to $381 million.
Boeing’s delayed 787 Dreamliner—originally due in 2008 and now expected by year’s end—has been a factor.
Aerospace group President Morton said he’s looking to 2011 and 2012 as likely years for development work on new efforts to start paying big dividends.
“We’ve got some pretty high expectations over the next several years for our aerospace business,” he said. “We’ll continue to look at ways to expand internally. But we’ll also be open to making more acquisitions in strategic markets offering key technologies and high levels of profitability.”
