Industry Is Expected to Lose Another 49,000 Jobs Next Year

The hard-hit U.S. military and civilian aircraft industry will suffer another 9% sales loss next year, spurring an additional cut of 49,000 jobs from the nation’s aerospace work force, the industry’s main trade group said Wednesday.

But those job cuts are also producing the major bright spot for the aircraft builders, the Aerospace Industries Assn. said in its annual survey.

Layoffs and other cost-cutting efforts will lift the industry’s combined profit this year to $5.5 billion--the highest since the AIA began tracking such figures in the mid-1970s.

Otherwise, the AIA’s survey shows that aircraft firms continue to be battered by reduced Pentagon spending and weak demand for commercial planes.

“For the industry as a whole, we see an overall sales curve that will dip sharply for the next two to three years, then flatten out,” AIA President Don Fuqua said in a statement.

The AIA--whose members also include producers of business planes, helicopters, missiles and spacecraft--said industry sales fell 10% this year to $124 billion. Sales of civilian jets, engines and parts had the biggest dollar decline, falling to $33 billion from a record $40 billion the previous year, the group said.

The AIA also said 131,000 aerospace jobs, or 13% of the work force, were eliminated in 1993, leaving 909,000.

By mid-1994, one-third of the nation’s aerospace work force--471,000 jobs--will have vanished since industry employment peaked in 1989, the group said.