Collins expands Florida radar production

Collins Aerospace is investing $26.5m to expand its facility in Largo, Florida, adding production capacity for commercial aviation radars and multi-domain security systems used by defence customers.

The RTX business expects the expansion to create more than 100 skilled jobs across engineering and factory operations. The Largo site already supports radar production, satellite and secure communications components, and testing for commercial and military customers. The new radar production area is expected to become fully operational by late 2026.

The investment comes as radar and surveillance equipment are becoming more heavily loaded across civil and defence markets. Airspace is busier, military operating environments are more contested, and governments are replacing ageing surveillance infrastructure with systems able to handle more complex traffic, data sharing, and security requirements. For defence customers, the same industrial base often supports airspace awareness, command-and-control, secure communications, and multi-domain coordination.

Work linked to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Radar System Replacement Program will be carried out at Largo. That includes production of the Condor Mk3 cooperative surveillance radar, which communicates directly with aircraft transponders, and the ASR-XM non-cooperative radar, which detects aircraft through reflected signals. Civil radar work may appear separate from defence production, but the manufacturing disciplines overlap heavily: RF electronics, signal processing, rugged hardware, configuration control, environmental testing, and long support cycles.

The factory expansion places physical investment behind a market increasingly defined by secure, interoperable systems. Radar output depends on more than antennas. It draws on radio-frequency components, digital receivers, transmitters, processors, power supplies, cooling systems, software, calibration equipment, quality assurance, and skilled technicians. Extra production space only creates value when the workforce and supplier base can scale with it.

That workforce requirement is becoming a strategic issue across defence manufacturing. IN Defence has tracked similar capacity moves in the component and subsystem tier, including Honeywell’s $500m expansion of munitions component capacity. The pattern is visible across the market: governments and primes are pushing investment deeper into the industrial base, where radar modules, guidance components, communications hardware, and electronic subsystems often determine the actual pace of delivery.

Florida is already a significant aerospace and defence production base for RTX. The group has operated in the state for more than four decades and employs more than 7,000 people across eight major locations. That existing footprint gives the Largo expansion a stronger labour and supplier context than a standalone facility investment. Radar and communications production benefits from proximity to engineering teams, test organisations, skilled operators, and regional suppliers already familiar with aerospace quality requirements.

The defence relevance lies in the role of radar and secure communications inside multi-domain operations. Military customers are trying to link aircraft, ships, ground systems, satellites, sensors, and command nodes into faster decision networks. Equipment must exchange data reliably, resist interference, remain cyber-secure, and keep operating under difficult environmental conditions. Factories producing radar and communications hardware therefore sit in the same capability chain as weapons and platforms, even when their output attracts less public attention.

Manufacturing complexity will rise as systems become more software-defined. Modern radar and surveillance equipment increasingly depend on digital processing, software updates, cybersecurity controls, and interoperability with wider networks. Production teams must manage hardware consistency while software teams handle version control, certification, and patching. Test procedures have to confirm not only that a unit works, but that it performs correctly inside the intended operating environment.

The Largo expansion also underlines the dual-use character of much of the aerospace and defence supply chain. Civil air traffic control modernisation and military situational awareness share requirements for reliability, availability, secure data exchange, and long-term sustainment. A radar production line supporting civil infrastructure can strengthen the skills, suppliers, and factory processes available for defence work, provided security and programme separation are properly managed.

Western defence customers are increasingly focused on industrial resilience below the prime-contractor level. Expanding aircraft, ship, or missile production delivers limited benefit if electronics, radars, communications equipment, and test systems cannot keep pace. Subsystem factories are becoming a strategic layer of the defence industrial base, with throughput tied directly to national-security readiness.

For Collins, the Largo investment gives RTX additional room to support radar and secure systems demand while adding skilled labour to a constrained market. The value is not only in the new production area, but in the ability to combine engineering, manufacturing, testing, and support in one site. Radar and communications equipment sit at the centre of how forces see, connect, and coordinate. Expanding that production capacity gives the wider defence market more of the infrastructure it needs to turn platforms and weapons into functioning operational networks.