Northrop Moving 100 Boeing Jobs to South

Northrop Corp. said Thursday that as part of an overall consolidation it will move some production related to the Boeing 747 airliner from Hawthorne to a just-completed plant in Perry, Ga.

According to Northrop, 100 of its 3,700 employees in the Boeing 747 program will be transfered to Perry.

The Boeing program is expected to take up 40% of the space at the new 750,000-square-foot Perry manufacturing plant, Northrop said, leading to speculation that the Tacit Rainbow anti-radar cruise missile program has been cancelled. Northrop built the Georgia plant to produce the missiles.

But Northrop spokesman Mike Greywitt said the remaining 60% of the Perry facility is set aside for missile production. “We have not been notified at all that there has been a change in our (Tacit Rainbow) contract,” he said. Test flights of missiles are continuing, he added.

The trade publication Defense News reported two weeks ago that the Pentagon had decided to kill the Tacit Rainbow programs for the Air Force and the Army to cut at least $5 billion from the defense budget. Northrop is developing the Air Force version.

In Perry, Northrop workers will assemble doors and frames for fuselage panels for the Boeing 747. Greywitt said the company expects to hire 400 people in Perry during the next two years to work on the Boeing program.

Greywitt said it was economical to move the operations across the country, even though parts made in Georgia will be shipped back to Hawthorne, where the 747 fuselage is built. Assembling doors and fuselage panel frames is labor-intensive, Greywitt said, noting that wage rates are lower in Perry than in Los Angeles.