Loral Aeronutronic Braces for the Change
The 1,100 managers, engineers, technicians and assemblers at Loral Aeronutronic in Rancho Santa Margarita learned Monday that they will be working for their third employer in six years.
The plant, which started life as a division of Ford Aerospace, will become part of Lockheed Martin Corp., which said Monday that it is acquiring most of Loral’s operations.
There was no word from either company about plans for the Orange County facility.
“It is business as usual,” said a Loral Corp. spokeswoman at the company’s New York headquarters. No layoffs, plant closings or relocations are expected until there is at least a new operating plan for the combined Loral-Lockheed units. That plan is to be prepared by Loral Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz and President Frank C. Lonza.
Both men will remain with Lockheed after the merger. Schwartz will be a vice chairman of Lockheed Martin and Lonza will be an executive vice president of the corporation and chief operating officer of its new tactical systems unit.
Employees at the Rancho Santa Margarita facility, Loral’s only presence in Southern California, got the same word--no changes are planned--in a memo issued Monday afternoon. But anxiety is running high at the plant, whose longtime workers have lived through layoffs in the past decade that have cut the work force by 75%.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty among the troops,” said Tom Krempasky, a project engineer at the plant who said he learned of the sale while he was listening to the radio on the way to work Monday morning.
Krempasky, a San Clemente resident who is married and has three children, said, “Jobs don’t look real promising for the future.”
A scheduling manager at Loral echoed that sentiment, adding: “Our company usually buys other companies, so it’s odd to be on the other end of the stick for a change. We’re not sure how that feels yet.”
But word of the change made some employees more hopeful, said one man who has been with the operation 18 years. The employee, who declined to give his name, said he hopes that under Lockheed, workers will regain some of the benefits they lost when Loral took over.
“We’re fairly optimistic because we went through this with Ford Aerospace” when it was acquired by Loral, he said. “Nobody’s given us any indication they’re downsizing any further,” he added. “We’re pretty bare-bones as it is.”
Executives at Santa Margarita Co., developer of the planned community and the business park in which Loral is a major tenant, also were holding their breaths Monday.
The development company’s executives consider the plant a key part of the southern Orange County community’s industrial area, and the industrial park a key ingredient in the development’s success.
Krempasky and other workers at Loral Aeronutronic help build the Sidewinder and Chaparral missiles, the Predator shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, controls for the Trident nuclear submarine missile, and a radar system for the F/A-18 Hornet jet fighter.
The company started as a part of Ford Aerospace in Orange County in 1960 and boomed with the defense buildup of the 1960s and ‘70s. It then stagnated in the 1980s as budget cutting became the trend in Washington. By the time Loral acquired Ford Aerospace 1990, employment at the Aeronutronic plant--then in Newport Beach--had dropped to 2,500 from about 4,000 in the mid-’80s.
Loral had barely changed the locks on the doors when it announced that it could not afford the rent in Newport and was looking for a new site, probably out of state.
That touched off a three-year scramble by business retention groups in Orange County and in state government that resulted in Loral’s 1993 decision to move to a recently abandoned Hughes Microelectronics building in Rancho Santa Margarita.
