Northrop spreads its wings with non-military projects
NEW YORK — A car is stolen here about every 30 minutes, making it one of the worst cities in the U.S. for auto theft. But on a recent morning at least one thief found how much harder it might become to ply his trade.
A test camera developed by Northrop Grumman Corp. detected a car that had been reported stolen, discerning it from hundreds of other vehicles passing through a busy intersection in lower Manhattan. The camera triggered an alarm at a command center across the East River in Brooklyn.
"It went up at 9:02 and at 9:08 it spotted its first stolen car," said Paul Chelson, Northrop's wireless program manager, whose team is deploying a citywide public safety network for New York's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
"Once they saw how it worked," he said, referring to police officials, "they got really excited."
Northrop, which has its headquarters in Century City, is better known for building nuclear submarines, stealth bombers and spy satellites. It is the world's largest military shipbuilder and one of the nation's leading defense contractors.
But in anticipation of a slowdown in Pentagon spending, Northrop is looking at a new growth business in helping cities change the way they fight crime, put out fires and read parking meters.
"They don't look as impressive as rockets, ships and airplanes, but the fact is that they are extraordinarily important and have immense value," Ronald D. Sugar, Northrop's chairman and chief executive, said of the company's non-defense projects.
To Northrop's thinking, chasing stolen cars through the urban canyons of Manhattan isn't all that different from building spy planes that can spot suspected terrorists in Afghanistan or developing communications centers to coordinate U.S. military operations in Iraq by satellite.
"What they are doing for New York is a good application of the skills they honed with the military," said Richard Phillips, Los Angeles-based vice president of the aerospace group for investment bank Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin. "It's not making buses, like they tried to do once."
Northrop indeed once tried to make and sell passenger buses, a business in which it flopped, and in the early 1960s it even helped build Dodger Stadium.
These days, Northrop aims to do more than just beat swords into plowshares and is focusing on projects that can draw from its principal businesses.
