6 Years, 3 Owners : O.C.’s Loral Employees Brace for Latest Change

RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA —  The 1,100 managers, engineers, technicians and assemblers at Loral Aeronutronic here learned Monday that they will be working for their third employer in six years.

The plant, which started life as a division of Ford Aerospace, will become part of Lockheed Martin Corp., which said Monday that it is acquiring most of Loral’s operations.

There was no word from either company about plans for the Orange County facility.

“It is business as usual,” said a Loral Corp. spokeswoman at the company’s New York headquarters. No layoffs, plant closings or relocations are expected until there is at least a new operating plan for the combined Loral-Lockheed units. That plan is to be prepared by Loral Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz and President Frank C. Lonza.

Both men will remain with Lockheed after the merger. Schwartz will be a vice chairman of Lockheed Martin and Lonza will be an executive vice president of the corporation and chief operating officer of its new tactical systems unit.

Employees at the Rancho Santa Margarita facility, Loral’s only presence in Southern California, got the same word--no changes are planned--in a memo issued Monday afternoon. But anxiety is running high at the plant, whose longtime workers have lived through layoffs in the past decade that have cut the work force by 75%.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty among the troops,” said Tom Krempasky, a project engineer at the plant who said he learned of the sale while as he was listening to the radio on the way to work Monday morning.

Krempasky, a San Clemente resident who is married and has three children, said, “Jobs don’t look real promising for the future.”

A manager at Loral echoed that sentiment, adding: “Our company usually buys other companies, so it’s odd to be on the other end of the stick for a change. We’re not sure how that feels yet.”

But word of the change made some employees more hopeful, said one man who has been with the operation 18 years. The employee, who declined to give his name, said he hopes that under Lockheed, workers will regain some of the benefits they lost when Loral took over.

“We’re fairly optimistic because we went through this with Ford Aerospace,” when it was acquired by Loral, he said. “Nobody’s given us any indication they’re downsizing any further,” he added. “We’re pretty bare-bones as it is.”

Executives at the Santa Margarita Co., developer of the planned community and the business park in which Loral is a major tenant, also were holding their breaths Monday.

The 300,000-square-foot building is the largest in Rancho Santa Margarita and Loral is the biggest local employer. The facility was built for a McDonnell Douglas unit that left in 1992 when its work shifted to Oceanside as part of a corporate reorganization.

The development company’s executives consider the plant a key part of south Orange County community’s industrial area, and the industrial park a key ingredient in the development’s success.

Krempasky and other workers at Loral Aeronutronic help build the Sidewinder and Chaparral missiles, the Predator shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, controls for the Trident nuclear submarine missile, and a radar system for the F/A-18 Hornet jet fighter.

The company started as a part of Ford Aerospace in Orange County in 1960 and boomed with the defense buildup of the 1960s and ‘70s. It then stagnated in the 1980s as budget cutting became the trend in Washington. By the time Loral acquired Ford Aerospace in 1990, employment at the Aeronutronic plant--then in Newport Beach--had dropped to 2,500 from about 4,000 in the mid-’80s.

Loral had barely changed the locks on the doors when it announced that it could not afford the rent in Newport and was looking for a new site, probably out of state.

That touched off a three-year scramble by business retention groups in Orange County and in state government that resulted in Loral’s 1993 decision to move to a recently abandoned Hughes Microelectronics building in Rancho Santa Margarita.

In the interim, further government defense cuts had trimmed Loral’s Orange County employment to about 1,400.

Attrition since then left about 1,100 workers at the facility Monday to hear the announcement that, pending government approval, Loral would become part of Lockheed Martin and the corporate name imprinted on their paychecks would change once again.

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Changing Once Again

Loral Aeronutronic, formerly Ford Aerospace, has been sold to Lockheed-Martin. Evolution of the firm’s ownership and Orange County presence:

* 1988: Ford Aerospace, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Co. founded in 1960, relocates corporate headquarters from Detroit to dual offices in Newport Beach and Washington, D.C. Its Aeronutronic group, located in Newport Beach, builds missile guidance systems and other defense products. It employs 3,549 and is the firm’s largest West Coast operation.

* 1990: Loral Corp. purchases Ford Aerospace for $715 million and announces it may move the Aeronutronic plant, which employs 2,500.

* 1993: Loral relocates Aeronutronic plant to the former Hughes Microelectronics building, a 300,000-square-foot facility in Rancho Santa Margarita. Defense cuts have reduced employment to about 1,400.

* 1996: Major portion of Loral Corp., including Aeronutronic division, purchased by Lockheed-Martin for $9.1 billion, pending government approval. The Rancho Santa Margarita plant employs 1,100 and constructs Sidewinder and Chaparral missiles, Predator shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, controls for Trident nuclear submarine missile, and a radar system for the F-18 aircraft. It develops infrared target-finding equipment.

Source: Times reports, Loral Corp.; Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times