Sky’s the limit with US deals
A BRISBANE company has secured two lucrative deals with multinational aerospace giants after developing their skills on Australia’s F-35 joint strike fighter project.
Heat Treatment Australia owner and director Karen Stanton said the new partnerships with BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin would significantly boost their operations in Brisbane and overseas.
Under the BAE contract, the company will assemble pressure manifolds at their recently opened state-of-the-art thermal processing facilities in Brisbane for commercial jet engines.
HTA’s manifolds will become part of the digital controls for the LEAP family of jet engines, which will power some of the biggest fleets of commercial aircraft in the world, including the Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus A320 neo. Ms Stanton said the deal was significant because the company had won a commercially competitive contract in the US by converting the skills developed from their defence work in Australia.
She said it was too early to know how many jobs the contract would create, but it would allow HTA to compete for much more work in the next few years after its manufacturing infrastructure set up.
“We expect more work to flow on because these engines will be on multiple platforms in the future,” Ms Stanton said.
HTA has also gained accreditation from Lockheed Martin to process material in its newly established facility in the United States. Ms Stanton said HTA would be able to displace US suppliers by processing raw materials in Los Angeles that were then sent to the supply chain in Australia.
“The processing has traditionally been done in the US, but now that we have accreditation we can do that work with the benefits flowing back to an Australian company,” she said.
Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne said HTA’s accreditation would create more jobs for Australians because the company would need local infrastructure to support the US operations.