The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Pratt & Whitney sees small profit in wake of cuts
With air travel showing signs of taxiing for a turnaround, Pratt & Whitney turned the corner as well in the last three months of 2020 — a major step for the largest private-sector employer in the Hartford-New Haven corridor that comes on the heels of large layoffs in the back half of 2020.
Entering last April, Raytheon completed its merger with Farmingtonbased United Technologies amid a collapse in the travel industry as people canceled vacations and meetings, and conventions evaporated.
The new Raytheon Technologies is based in Waltham, Mass., and led by former UTC CEO Greg Hayes. In addition to its historic defense businesses, Raytheon includes former UTC subsidiaries Pratt & Whitney, based in East Hartford, and Collins Aerospace, based in Charlotte, N.C., which has operations in Windsor Locks.
In advance of the merger, UTC spun off Otis Worldwide in Farmington and Carrier Global, based in in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., as independent businesses, while selling a Collins Aerospace optics and satellite technology lab in Danbury.
During a conference call Tuesday, Hayes said Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace remain dependent on the pace of vaccinations, with a cascade effect on ticket reservations that he expects will return idle aircraft to the sky.
“There’s a lot of white tails sitting out there right now,” Hayes said Tuesday. “It’s simply a matter of time.”
A $33 million profit in the fourth quarter was not nearly enough to keep Pratt & Whitney out of the red for the full year, as the division racked up a $564 million loss after earning $1.8 billion the year before. Sales dropped 20 percent to $16.8 billion, nearly $4.5 billion of it booked in the fourth quarter that was a nearly 20 percent improvement from the prior three months.
Raytheon reported a $3.5 billion loss for the year, driven primarily by accounting adjustments reflecting lost value in the businesses it acquired last year.
Last fall, Raytheon confirmed hundreds of job cuts at Pratt & Whitney facilities in Connecticut, en route to cutting headcount by as many as 21,000 people across Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace, including external contractors. At the same time, the company announced it would create hundreds of future jobs in North Carolina, after getting incentives to build a new Pratt & Whitney center there that will focus on making airfoils that provide engine thrust.
“Clearly on the production side, we’ll see some folks added back as volume comes back,” Hayes said. “We cut deep, we cut where we had to — but I don’t think we have sacrificed the future in any way.”
Pratt & Whitney listed less than 20 open jobs in Connecticut as of Tuesday morning, of about 70 in the United States and a handful more in Canada, Puerto Rico and Singapore.
A Pratt & Whitney spokesperson stated Tuesday the company had 36,000 employees globally — that is down from 43,000 it had reported in October — while maintaining its Connecticut workforce at about 11,000 people. That trails only the Electric Boat submarine shipyard in Groton, owned by General Dynamics, among private Connecticut employers.
On Monday, Raytheon announced Pratt & Whitney’s first big order for airline jet engines since the start of the pandemic, which will power more than 130 aircraft on order by Frontier Airlines. The carrier will mount Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan engine on three models of Airbus aircraft. The GTF was designed by engineers in East Hartford to allow a front fan to spin at a slower rate than a turbine behind it, creating greater efficiency.
Airbus flew a plane mounted with the jet engine across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in 2016, from Bradley International Airport to Toulouse, France. The GTF engine allows airlines to purchase smaller aircraft to make the transatlantic flight, due to between a 16 percent and 20 percent reduction in fuel consumption.