Seal Beach Plant to Do B-1B Upgrades
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SEAL BEACH — A contract to build upgrades for the Air Force’s B-1B bomber will keep 100 to 125 engineers employed at a Rockwell International Corp. unit in Seal Beach for the next four years, the company said Wednesday.
The $232-million contract, which Rockwell had expected to win, will also support about 100 manufacturing and flight-testing jobs at Rockwell sites in Palmdale and at Edwards Air Force Base.
Rockwell and a subcontractor, Boeing Military Airplane Co., in Seattle, will upgrade two B-1Bs with additional weapons, navigation equipment, and electronic components. Once that work is completed, Rockwell is expected to win a further contract to upgrade the rest of the Air Force’s fleet of 96 B-1Bs by the year 2002.
No new jobs will be created through the award, said Rockwell spokesman Mike Mathews. Workers will be carried over from a previous B-1B contract, worth $65 million, won by Rockwell’s North American Aircraft Division.
The unit, which was moved from El Segundo to Seal Beach in early 1994, had sales of $583 million last year--more than half of which was related to work on the B-1B.
Rockwell was the prime B-1B contractor for the Air Force, which paid $20.5 billion in 1981 dollars for 100 of the planes. Four have since crashed.
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