A Santa Ana-based manufacturer has landed a multimillion-dollar contract to supply key electrical components for specialized radios made by Boeing Co. in Huntington Beach for military search-and-rescue missions.
The three-year deal calls for privately held Cal Quality Electronics Inc. to supply the Chicago-based aerospace and defense giant with printed circuit boards and advanced assembly for a next-generation survival radio system. The radios rely on multiple satellite links for secure voice communications, digital messaging, global geopositioning, navigation and location-finding applications.
“It’s a significant-size deal,” said Ken Haney, vice president of sales and marketing for Cal Quality. “This is the first really major contract with Boeing.”
Both companies wouldn’t share the contract’s exact dollar figure.
Cal Quality specializes in low-volume, high-complexity production runs for the medical, industrial, communications, aerospace and defense markets.
The company handles everything from single-digit prototypes to 5,000-unit daily runs at its 60,000-square-foot headquarters in Santa Ana, its home since 1996.
It does custom orders, from circuit board and cable assembly to complete equipment manufacturing, including in-flight entertainment systems and health monitoring machines.
The scope of work is wide, with its electrical systems powering liquor pourers in bars to solar panel control systems. New Brunswick, N.J.-based Johnson & Johnson Services Inc. has been a customer for more than two decades.
Cal Quality, which was established in 1981, was Orange County’s sixth largest contract electronics maker last year, with 165 employees, according to Business Journal research.
The company serves customers in about a 200-mile radius around Santa Ana, reaching as far south as San Diego and as far north as Santa Barbara.
Its Boeing contract falls under the aerospace company’s “Combat Survivor Evader Locater” program, which was established in 1998 and funded by the U.S. Air Force to produce lightweight and rugged handheld radios used in rescues of downed pilots and armed forces in battle.
Research and development for the program is based in Huntington Beach. That’s where Cal Quality will ship its components for the radios, which are ultimately assembled and tested at a Boeing manufacturing plant in Smithfield, Penn., before they’re distributed to the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps and Navy.
Contracts
Boeing has delivered more than 55,000 radio units to joint forces since the program’s inception. The company has received more than $232 million in government contracts to produce the radios and related equipment, as well as to upgrade base stations and high-frequency tuners.
It recently landed a $24 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to deliver an additional 2,550 units. Earlier versions have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The demand for improved combat search-and-rescue systems stemmed from communications problems that plagued operations in Southeast Asia and Bosnia in the 1980s and 1990s and led to low recovery rates and exposed U.S. forces and allies to enemy threats, according to U.S. and Boeing officials.
The program is managed by Boeing’s St. Louis-based Defense, Space & Security division, which has about $33 billion in annual revenue and makes military equipment, systems and aircraft. The unit employs some 58,000 companywide.
The division has long counted on its
Huntington Beach hub for key technological developments. A year ago, it was tapped
to develop Phantom Phoenix, a new line
of small satellites geared for the defense
and commercial sectors. An overriding goal of the program is to manufacture systems quickly and affordably for particular missions.
The hub has carved out a niche producing smaller satellites, known as “nanosats,” that contain sensors and GPS receivers to gather data for weather prediction and analysis, among other functions.
Boeing has signaled there’s enough demand for smaller satellites to produce a multibillion-dollar market in the next decade. The satellites would be used for everything from intelligence gathering to science education and weather tracking.
Boeing, one of the county’s largest employers (see story, page 4), is in the middle of a nationwide cost-cutting campaign to improve efficiencies, restructure operations and sell unneeded real estate.
