Hughes Wins $66-Million Extension of Navy Contract : Defense: Company will supply data display equipment for warships. No new jobs are likely.

Hughes Aircraft Co. said Wednesday that it received a late Christmas present: a $66-million contract to supply data display equipment for Navy warships.

The contract is not likely to result in any new jobs at the Surface Systems division of Hughes’ Aerospace and Defense sector in Fullerton. But spokesman Dan Reeder said it will help stave off further layoffs among the remaining 7,000 workers in the division, which has seen its work force shrink from a high of 15,000 in 1986.

Reeder said this is the latest portion of a contract that will almost certainly grow to $143 million. It is another extension of a program that began about 10 years ago to interface radar, communications and weapons aboard advanced warships.

“These days, you have to protect the programs you have had around for a while,” he said.

The Navy awarded the contract Dec. 29, but Reeder said a public announcement was not made right away. About 14% of the equipment purchased under the contract will be installed in Japanese warships.

Reeder called the contract significant, but it is still dwarfed by the $867-million order that the division received in 1991 for a battlefield management system for Saudi Arabia. The Saudi contract, Reeder said, is about half completed.

The extension of the Navy contract could not have come at a better time. The Westchester-based unit of GM Hughes Electronics is beginning a six-month period in which executives say there will be no additional layoffs.

Reeder said Hughes plans to “catch its breath” after steady job losses spawned by the defense industry’s streamlining and recession.