Boeing Co

Boeing Co. won an Air Force award that is valued at as much as $2.02 billion to replace cracking wings on aging A-10 antitank aircraft, beating larger rival Lockheed Martin Corp.

Two auditors who helped expose violations in Boeing Co.'s financial reporting practices weren't entitled to whistleblower protections because they leaked the information to a newspaper instead of the appropriate authorities, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. A federal accounting law — the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 — protects whistleblowers in publicly traded companies only when they report the irregularities to financial regulators, Congress or their supervisors, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said.

Boeing Co., the largest private contractor to the U.S. space program, said it would join Northrop Grumman Corp. in bidding for a contract to develop NASA's next manned spacecraft, which could carry people to the moon and Mars. The contract for the so-called crew exploration vehicle will be the largest awarded by NASA in the next five years, worth as much as $5 billion through 2010.

Ford Motor Co. earned the most money in more than a decade last year, and that has triggered a big payday for the automaker's top executives. Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally received stock worth $56.5 million before taxes, the company said in Securities and Exchange Commission filings Monday. The dollar figure is based on the closing price of Ford's shares March 3, a company spokesman said. Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr. was awarded stock worth $42.4 million. Mulally, a former Boeing Co. senior executive, is credited with turning Ford around and keeping it solvent when General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group both filed for bankruptcy and survived only because of massive government bailouts.

Boeing Co. won a contract from the Pentagon to modify a small unmanned aircraft to enable the plane to detect chemical and biological weapons. The two-year, $8.2-million program will equip two ScanEagle unmanned planes, now being used by the Navy and Marines, with sensors capable of remotely detecting the presence of biological agents before a target is attacked by military forces, Boeing said.

Boeing Co., the world's biggest plane maker and Southern California's largest employer, is likely to accelerate a consolidation of its operations this year as the company moves to improve efficiency, Chief Financial Officer Michael Sears said Wednesday. Sears said the company, which employs 189,000 people in more than two dozen states, could sell some plants or take other steps to trim factory space, according to analysts at a meeting with Sears in New York.

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

The elementary school pupils look like typical kids at camp. On a hot summer's day, they busily brighten sombreros with colorful paint and glitter. But wait. Those aren't sombreros. They're Saturn hats. The round middle is the planet and the wide brim the planet's atmosphere. For the last three weeks, 340 students from all over Southern California descended on Anaheim Union High School District's Oxford Academy in Cypress to attend the Boeing Co.'

* Boeing Co. has won a $188-million contract to modify three C-130H2 aircraft into AC-130U gunships, the Air Force said.

About 450 Boeing Co. aircraft workers from Seattle have taken up residence in Palmdale hotels and apartments--many equipped with spas, swimming pools and racquetball courts--under an unusual assignment in the B-2 Stealth bomber program. Boeing, a B-2 subcontractor to Northrop Corp.

Chicago-based Boeing Co. has won the $35-billion contract to build a fleet of aerial refueling tankers, possibly the culmination of a dramatic decade-long battle that the aerospace world has been following. The bitter fight between Airbus parent company European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co., or EADS, and archrival Boeing. has been hard fought. There are tens of thousands of jobs at stake, and many in the defense industry believe that the lucrative tanker contract could be the last new major Pentagon purchase for years to come.

After years of cutbacks and shrinking orders, Boeing Co.'s sprawling satellite-making operation in El Segundo got a major lift Monday with a $1-billion contract for three satellites for the Mexican government. The deal, which also includes supplying ground-based communications equipment, was the second big satellite contract for Boeing this year and should help keep the production line humming at a time when the state is facing a 12.4% unemployment rate. The large order could help preserve high-paying engineering jobs in Southern California and throws a lifeline to hundreds of smaller firms that supply parts for the massive satellites.

At Boeing Co.'s cyber operations center in St. Louis, a flashing, 54-inch computer screen warns of modern-day burglars and spies. In an hour's time on a typical morning this spring, Boeing's elaborate detection system logged 3,722 suspicious efforts to gain access to the company's global computer network. Boeing analysts worked swiftly with company cyber sleuths at other locations to secure the network and identify would-be intruders. But tracking the hackers can be tough, even with their nine-digit Internet Protocol addresses flickering in vertical rows on the huge color monitor.

For sale: a mammoth four-engine plane that can haul 60-ton tanks, troops and medical gear across continents and still land on short, shoddy runways. Price: about $240 million; volume discounts are available. If interested, please contact Boeing Co. at your nearest air show. That's the sales pitch that Boeing officials have been making worldwide recently, in hopes of keeping its sprawling C-17 assembly line in Long Beach from closing in two years. The plant, adjacent to Long Beach Airport, employs about 5,000 people and is one of the last remaining aircraft plants in Southern California.

The multibillion-dollar competition to build aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force is expected to kick off this week as the Pentagon spells out its latest requirements to replace its aging fleet of Eisenhower-era aircraft. But there are already signs that the competition could be derailed once again. Century City-based Northrop Grumman Corp., one of the two contenders, has threatened to withdraw its bid, accusing the Air Force of writing specifications that favor its rival, Boeing Co. The latest specs for the tankers, which refuel warplanes in flight, are due out this week -- possibly as early as Tuesday.

A Chinese-born aerospace engineer who had access to sensitive material while working with a pair of major defense contractors in Southern California was sentenced Monday to more than 15 years in prison for acquiring secret space shuttle data and other information for China. U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney in Santa Ana imposed a 188-month prison term on Dongfan "Greg" Chung, 73, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Orange. Carney declared that he could not "put a price tag" on national security and sought to send a signal to China to "stop sending your spies here," according to the U.S. attorney's office.

The lead singer for Motley Crue has sued Boeing North American Inc. claiming that his daughter's death by cancer in 1995 was caused by radioactive material dumped in the soil and ground water near his former home near the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Vince Neil and his ex-wife, Sharise, bought a home in Chatsworth in 1991, a few miles east of Boeing's Rocketdyne Division. Boeing acquired the property in 1996 when it bought Rockwell International's aerospace and defense businesses.

Seattle-based Boeing Co. Chief Executive Philip Condit was named CEO of the year by his peers in an annual award given by Financial World Magazine.

Boeing Co. swung to a fourth-quarter profit compared with a loss last year, when a machinists' strike halted production lines. The aerospace company Wednesday reported earnings of $1.27 billion, or $1.75 a share. Boeing lost $86 million, or 12 cents, in the same quarter last year. Revenue rose to $17.9 billion from $12.7 billion a year earlier. Boeing posted a profit despite facing an economic downturn that shrank orders for airplanes. Amid the depressed economic environment, airlines were stung by a slump in air travel, and few ordered new planes.

Despite Boeing's strenuous efforts to reduce the 787 Dreamliner's weight, the plane weighed more than expected when it first rolled out two years ago. Days before the plane's maiden flight last week, Boeing published a document for airlines that suggests to some weight-watching industry analysts that the 787 still exceeds its original target weight by a few tons. Airlines have ordered 840 of the pioneering composite-plastic planes based on Boeing's projections for its range, payload and fuel efficiency -- all reduced by added weight.