Hughes Group Wins 2nd Big Job in Month

Landing its second major contract in a month, Hughes Aircraft Co.’s Ground Systems Group confirmed Wednesday that it has won a $91.5-million order to build an air defense system for the government of Taiwan.

Under the contract, Hughes will revamp Taiwan’s existing air defense system. The system is intended to provide advance warning of enemy air attacks and to direct counterattacks against the enemy aircraft.

Hughes made no public announcement of the Taiwan contract but published an article about the award in the Dec. 15 edition of a company newsletter.

The contract with Taiwan is important to Hughes because it provides a boost to one of the Fullerton unit’s oldest and biggest businesses: building air defense systems. Hughes has built 23 air defense systems during the past two decades.

The business boomed in the mid-1980s, when many nations were building or overhauling their defense systems. At one point earlier in this decade, Hughes alone was involved in building air defense systems for nine nations, but business has since fallen off.

“There are not many of these contracts out in the world right now,” said a Hughes official who asked that his name not be used.

With the Taiwan contract, Hughes will have three programs under way, including systems for Egypt and the United Kingdom, the Hughes official said.

The last month has been a good one for the Fullerton plant.

Like many defense operations, it has been struggling to cope with stingier Pentagon budgets and has reduced its employment from a peak of 15,000 employees in 1985--at the height of the Reagan Administration defense buildup--to about 10,000 now.

Late last month, the Ground Systems Group scored a major victory by beating out International Business Machines Corp. for a $325-million contract to upgrade Canada’s air traffic control system.

In August, 1988, IBM beat out Hughes for a $3.6-billion contract--the largest ever awarded by the Federal Aviation Administration--to overhaul the nation’s air traffic control system. The loss was a tough blow to the Fullerton unit, which was forced to close a division that had been formed to work on the contract.