Boeing is promising to bring nearly two thousand jobs to Florida if it wins a military contract to build a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers, a contract that would add hundreds of Florida engineering jobs.

The company is releasing new information about the project’s potential economic impact. The contract would help Florida’s burgeoning unemployment rate.

Boeing spokesman Bill Barksdale says the contract could provide a major boost for the company’s Florida contractors.

“We are projecting 19 hundred total jobs in the state of Florida and the annual estimated economic impact, if we would be selected for this contract, would be about 95 million dollars.”

Boeing’s chief rival in the bidding race had been a partnership between Northrop-Grumman and European based Airbus. Earlier this month Northrop dropped out of the competition but the French parent company of Airbus says it still wants to be considered.

Boeing is not saying where in Florida the new workers would be based. Northrop-Grumman had promised 500 new jobs at its Melbourne facility if it had won the 35-billion-dollar contract.

According to FloridaTrend.com, the companies are competing for a $35-billion contract to build 179 tanker airplanes that would replace the Eisenhower-era KC-135 aircraft in service today. Both Boeing, the nation’s second-largest defense contractor, and Northrop Grumman, the third-largest, have won one round of bidding, but both bids were ultimately rescinded — Boeing’s amid corruption allegations over a lease plan, and Northrop Grumman’s over whether the Air Force’s technical specifications for the new plane were unfair. Both companies are working on a new round of proposals for a contract expected to be awarded by the middle of this year.

With additional aircraft to be ordered in the future, the contract could be worth $100 billion. While Boeing would handle most of the work in Washington state and Kansas, Northrop Grumman would create a new hub of aerospace activity in the Southeast — eventually adding 1,600 to 1,700 direct and indirect jobs to the company’s Melbourne operations.

Northrop Grumman, teaming with the North America division of United Kingdom-based EADS, would assemble a KC-45, a modified A330 Airbus built in the U.S. and outfitted with tanks and other refueling-related gear. More than 400 similar aircraft are in use or on order by the military in Australia, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Boeing’s proposal is for a variation of its KC-767.

The jobs created as a result of the new work, says Bill Welser, a 35-year Air Force veteran who is vice president of business development for Northrop’s Air Mobility Systems, “could stretch from 20 to 40 years into the future. You’re talking about hundreds of highly technical, high-paying jobs this tanker would bring to Brevard County.”

The current Brevard-based tanker workforce of 100 would swell to 500 during the design and development phase, with hundreds more hired later to work on modifications to the aircraft, including systems, vehicle production, software, hardware and aerospace engineers.

A Northrop win could be a boon for other parts of Florida, too. Plans call for creating an assembly plant in Alabama, where 4,800 new jobs would attract workers from the Florida Panhandle, and for bringing in at least nine Florida suppliers that would support almost 4,000 additional employees, Welser says.

The competition for the contract has turned bitter, with both companies dealing with contentions that some of their manufacturing is conducted outside the United States — especially Northrop Grumman with its EADS connection. Some analysts say neither will give up and that the only solution may be to split the contract between them.

Tags: Boeing florida jobs, Boeing jobs

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Engineering, Manufacturing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.