Aerospace Industry

A dozen Boeing Co. machinists huddled over an oil-drum fire in the chilly morning drizzle, hooting as white trucks periodically cruised past them and into the gates of the massive airplane assembly plant. Belonging to a North Carolina contractor, the trucks carried parts for Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner -- which would be under construction inside were the union machinists not hurtling catcalls outside, locked in a seven-week-old strike that some estimate is costing Boeing $100 million a day.

At Boeing Co.'s sprawling satellite-making complex in El Segundo, engineers for decades pioneered space systems that helped vastly alter the way we communicate by telephone and watch television today. But in recent years, the workload has sputtered under a cloud of slow orders, and the aerospace giant is now hoping for a lifeline from an upcoming Pentagon contract potentially worth more than $15 billion.

The chronically troubled effort to build a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force was delayed yet again after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Wednesday that the competition that selected Northrop Grumman Corp. was flawed and would be opened for the third time in seven years. The decision is a blow to the Century City-based aerospace giant, which was the surprise winner of the $35-billion contract over archrival Boeing Co. in February.

Aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. said Wednesday that it was suspending the hiring of thousands of engineers in Southern California after a ruling by a federal auditing agency left its $35-billion Air Force contract to build aerial refueling tankers in limbo.

Kaiser Aluminum Corp. said its first-quarter profit more than doubled, but its stock fell more than 10% after the company forecast lower production than anticipated this year. "We are not market-constrained, we are production-constrained this year," Chairman and Chief Executive Jack Hockema said. He said there was a short, unplanned outage at a light-gauge furnace during the first quarter. In addition, a planned four-month shutdown for maintenance at another furnace in Spokane, Wash.

Boeing Co. delivered 115 commercial airplanes in the first quarter, up 8% from a year earlier. The aerospace company's total leaves it just off the pace it needs to reach its 2008 target of 475 to 480 planes. The first-quarter figure was up from 106 a year earlier, when the Chicago-based company registered its highest quarterly total in nearly five years.

Century City-based Northrop Grumman Corp. hired the lobbying firm of former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to protect its $35-billion Air Force tanker contract from challenges by losing bidder Boeing Co.

The Justice Department on Monday announced the indictment and arrest of a longtime aerospace worker in Southern California for allegedly passing classified documents to China in an elaborate espionage endeavor that spanned two decades and exposed trade secrets from the space shuttle, the Delta IV rocket and the C-17 military transport aircraft. Dongfan Chung, 72, a native of China who became a naturalized U.S.

The Air Force is reviewing decades-old contracts to determine whether manufacturers of U.S. fighter jets bear responsibility for a defect that caused one of the planes to break apart in flight late last year, officials said Thursday. An investigation of the November crash of an F-15 showed that one of several support beams in the plane was thinner than design specifications required. That faulty part caused a failure that split the plane in two.

Airbus, the world's biggest aircraft maker, got an order from Los Angeles-based International Lease Finance Corp. for 20 A350 wide-body jets, fewer than analysts had expected and smaller than the company's contract for Boeing Co.'s 787. The deal is valued at about $4 billion at list prices. ILFC, the world's largest aircraft purchaser and the biggest customer of France's Airbus, is buying 74 Dreamliners.