$795M Navy contract to Northrop Grumman

The Navy said Friday that it is awarding Northrop Grumman $795 million more for 11 E-2D Advanced Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, which have some engineering done in Bethpage.

The company said it doesn't expect the funding, which covers work through May 2015, to create additional jobs, but said it would stabilize the workforce, which includes about 1,600 people on Long Island.

The funding announced Friday by the Navy is to finish and deliver six aircraft and begin acquiring materials and making other preparations to building another five.

All of the work covered in Friday's contract awards is to be completed in 2015. The Navy hopes to buy a total of 75 of the planes by 2021. Northrop Grumman has delivered five E-2Ds to the Navy so far, said spokeswoman Kirsti Dunn in Maryland.

The first was delivered a year ago in a ceremony held at Norfolk Naval Air Station in Virginia at which Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, called it a "game changer" in naval aviation.

The planes are assembled at Northrop Grumman's East Coast Manufacturing and Flight Test Center in St. Augustine, Fla. The program management office for the E-2D is in Bethpage, where engineering and design of the surveillance system is done.

The E-2D represents the evolution of an airplane in service since the 1960s that is topped by a distinctive radar dish and whose mission is to survey air, sea and land battlefields to help protect friendly forces and help commanders conduct battles.

The Advanced Hawkeye made its first aircraft carrier landing earlier this year, on the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman, where it was flown for testing.

Northrop Grumman says the new plane, in design since 2003, has new radar and a new radar dish, both of which can work in concert with land forces to detect, track and defeat cruise missile threats at extended range.

The company says the "D" also has a new cockpit, a more advanced system to identify friendly and unfriendly aircraft, and modernized communications.