London-based Smiths Group PLC’s $110 million buy last year of Santa Ana-based Integrated Aerospace Inc. already has paid off.
The Santa Ana maker of airplane landing gear, which now goes by Smiths Aerospace, won a $150 million contract last week to design and develop landing gear for Northrop Grumman Corp.’s X-47B combat aircraft.
Smiths said it expects to deliver the landing gear in the first quarter of next year.
Los Angeles-based Northrop is developing the X-47B under a $1 billion, five-year contract with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The plane is designed as an unmaned fighter jet that’s flown remotely and can take off and land on aircraft carriers.
The Santa Ana operation of Smiths Aerospace had been working on products for unmanned aircraft before it was bought in October.
That, along with the company’s overall defense business, made it attractive to Smiths, according to Peter Woolfrey, the company’s business development director.
Parent company Smiths counts yearly sales of $5 billion. The aerospace division is its largest.
Smiths also makes industrial hosing, ducting, seals, electrical connectors as well as medical devices.
Smiths Aerospace has about 200 workers in about 300,000 square feet of space in Santa Ana. It also has a Signal Hill plant.
Along with unmanned aerial vehicles, Smiths’ parts are found on helicopters, commercial planes and military aircraft such as United Technologies Corp.’s Black Hawk helicopter and Boeing Co.’s Super Hornet.
Other Projects
Ongoing projects in Santa Ana include an $18 million order for 950 fixed landing gears for the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, due by the end of 2006.
Boca Raton, Fla.-based Brockway Moran & Partners Inc., which sold the Santa Ana operation to Smiths, formed the business in 1999 by combining four companies: Trig Holding Inc., Derlan Inc., Sun Eight Co. and High Tech West Inc.
Trig and Derlan, which made up the landing gear unit at Integrated Aerospace, were consolidated into Derlan’s Santa Ana facility.
Sun Eight and High Tech, which accounted for Integrated’s structural, or fuselage, wing and tail division, share High Tech’s Signal Hill headquarters.
Brockway said it decided to sell the business while the aerospace market was on the upswing. The sale was one of several recent aerospace deals locally.
The firm also sold Dynamic Cooking Systems Inc. of Huntington Beach in 2003 to New Zealand’s Fisher & Paykel Appliance Holdings Ltd. for about $33 million.
Brockway’s other OC investments include Santa Ana-based contract electronics maker TTM Technologies Inc., which went public in 2000.
