BERKELEY — Boeing added hundreds to its ºüÀêÊÓƵ-area workforce last year, with an eye toward the next generations of defense aircraft.
The company added 900 jobs in the region in 2022. Many were engineers, who will be needed as the company shifts to future products, Steve Nordlund, senior site executive for Boeing ºüÀêÊÓƵ, said in an interview on Wednesday.
It’s not yet clear what those aircraft will be. But they will include efforts to build a new fighter jet.
“When you’re hiring engineers, it signals that you’re developing products for the future,†said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute.
Boeing employs about 15,800 people in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ area, where its operations are largely in defense products. It’s the company’s second-largest workforce after Washington state, where it employs 60,200. The company makes the F-15, F/A-18 fighter jets, the T-7A trainer and the MQ-25 refueling drone at sites in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County, St. Charles and Mascoutah.
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Boeing’s overall employment has been recovering after a significant drop during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s workforce totaled 161,000 at the end of 2019, then dropped to 141,000 by the end of 2020. By the end of last year it had risen to 156,000.
The company plans to hire about 10,000 this year, according to a spokesperson.
The earlier this month that the company planned to cut about 2,000 finance and human resources positions through both attrition and layoffs, and set up two “finance hubs†in ºüÀêÊÓƵ and in Mesa, Arizona.
Nordlund said he did not have details on whether the company will need to add finance positions locally.
The industry has struggled with three years of pandemic-related and broader economic challenges.
“This year is all about getting stability — in the supply chain and in the labor force,†Nordlund said.
The company is building three new facilities in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ area, including an assembly line to make MQ-25 drones at MidAmerica Airport in Mascoutah. The other two sites are a specialized lab and test facility and an advanced coatings center.
Boeing is already making a small number of MQ-25s in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County, and is on track to finish construction at the MidAmerica site in 2024, Nordlund said.
The MQ-25 is an unmanned drone that refuels other crafts midflight, allowing planes launching from carriers to venture farther than they otherwise could.
Nordlund said he thinks Boeing is “just scratching the surface†on the drone’s potential capabilities. It’s possible that it could be used for more than refueling.
“The untapped opportunity for that system is very significant,†he said.
In the months ahead, Boeing will likely also ramp up production on its T-7 training jets, which it unveiled 10 months ago.
“That will have a long shelf life,†Nordlund said. With that aircraft, he said, “We have decades of business to come.â€
But the big prize isn’t the T-7s.
The Pentagon has been working to phase out purchases of Boeing’s legacy fighters from its defense budgets. The U.S. wants to focus on a next-generation fighter.
Winning that contract, analysts have long said, will determine the future of Boeing’s fighter-jet business.
Austin Huguelet of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.