Sept. 25, 2009

More layoffs are coming at Wichita's Hawker Beechcraft plant. The plant issued another 240 WARN notices to employees covered by the machinist union contract Friday. WARN stands for Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. They are 60 day notices.

Our information is coming from employees calling the KAKE Newsroom, as well as Machinist Union sources who have confirmed to us that the union has been notified.

We checked with HBC officials, but they declined to comment.

Hawker's letter to the union says those 240 employees affected by Friday's notices will be leaving the company between November 24th and December 8th.

Two of the production lines affected by these cuts are the Horizon jet line where 87 positions are cut. The rest of the cuts affect the King Air line, where all departments are affected.

Aside from these new notices, there are some other employees exiting Hawker, as their previous 60 day notices expire. We have also learned that some of the 2nd and 3rd shifts in plant 4 will be consolidated into 1st shift.

A Hawker spokeswoman says the company continues to assess 2nd and 3rd shift to manage production with customer demand. Nicole Alexander says the 2nd shift is currently operational for the majority of the product lines.

Friday's WARN notices put the number of layoffs at HBC in the past 10 months at 3,553, or about 36 percent of last October's total work force.