Hupp gets $27.1M in defense contracts, will add employees

A New Haven logistics services company has been awarded $27.1 million in U.S. Department of Defense business within the last month. Hupp Aerospace/Defense was awarded a $19.9 million, two-year contract with three one-year options from the department to provide phase maintenance kits for the Army's CH-47 Chinook helicopter. The contract was awarded by the Defense Supply Center of Richmond in Richmond, Va., on Dec. 5. A week earlier, the center had awarded it a similar, $7.2 million contract to provide maintenance kits for the Army's AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. The company now employs 35 and is trying to determine how many more workers will be needed to handle the new business. Hupp assembles maintenance kits, which it now calls Hupp Kits, for military aircraft, including Chinook, Apache and Black Hawk helicopters. It supplies kits now to the Army, Air Force and Navy. The company began assembling such maintenance kits about seven years ago. Hupp Aerospace has been in business since 1979, first as a consultant on government contracts before changing direction in the late 1990s. The so-called phase kits are complete collections of specified parts that have to be replaced on a regular basis. For example, that's everything from tires to washers and bolts on the Black Hawk, 140 parts in all, that have to be replaced every 500 hours of flight time. Those complete overhauls are needed because a pilot can't pull into a service station to fix a problem while flying at 15,000 feet. The traditional military approach to maintenance had been to file requisitions for each part -- 139 requisitions in the case of the Black Hawk. If the part is in storage, it's shipped from a supply depot. If not, the requisition then goes on to a manufacturer, where it may be several more weeks before the part is produced and shipped. As a result, the military considered six weeks for a major overhaul pretty good. Hupp officials say its kits can reduce that time by at least one-third, and the kits sell for much less that its parts cost when purchased individually. Now, Hupp Kits are shipped out continually, to wherever the military services aircraft on a regular basis.