The growing market for unmanned aircraft has created 150 job openings at Northrop Grumman’s San Diego area plants, where the company develops the Global Hawk, Fire Scout and the X-47B.“These are new jobs, not replacement positions,” said Warren Comer, a Northrop spokesman. “And most of the openings are for engineers.”
Northrop employs about 4,000 people at its plants in Rancho Bernardo, Carmel Mountain Ranch, Kearny Mesa and Mission Valley. About 2,200 of those people work on unmanned systems like Global Hawk, a high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft that’s been broadly used for reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence gathering, as well as for collecting scientific information. Much of the company’s current growth involves an upgraded version of the Fire Scout that is being designed to fly from any Navy ship that can take aircraft.
Northrop has long been one of the region’s biggest defense contractors. The Defense Department awarded Northrop’s San Diego-area operation almost $1.5 billion in contracts in fiscal 2009, roughly the same amount that went to the local plants run by SAIC and General Dynamics. General Atomics and local subsidiaries brought in $1.3 billion.
Source: San Diego Tribune