Calspan wins 5-year DOT contract
By Matt Glynn
NEWS BUSINESS REPORTER
Published:September 13,
2011, 8:00 AM
BuffaloNews.com
Calspan Corp. was
awarded a five-year, $40 million contract by the U.S. Department of
Transportation to continue research of motor vehicle crashes.
The contract will help Calspan
retain 71 jobs, including 23 locally, and could mean additional hiring by the
company, said Louis H. Knotts, the president and chief executive officer.
"It assures that our crash data research
center is going to prosper and grow for the next five years," said Knotts,
who was a part of a local buyout of Calspan six years
ago. "We've had this contract a long time, but you have to compete [for]
it every five years, whether you've had it a long time or not."
The contract, Calspan's
largest, was awarded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,
which is part of the Department of Transportation.
The contract involves Calspan's
operation of the National Automotive Sampling System Zone Center 1 for the
Department of Transportation. The zone covers the Eastern United States, with
the hub at Calspan's headquarters in Cheektowaga and
13 satellite offices.
The National Automotive Sampling System is a
database used to improve highway safety, involving the collection of crash data
from counties and major cities. "This is important work," Knotts
said. "It helps make our highways safer, and safety is one of the primary
themes of what goes on here at Calspan."
Calspan announced
the new contract Monday at its Genesee Street facility, with Reps. Brian
Higgins, D-Buffalo, and Kathleen C. Hochul,
D-Amherst, attending. A smashed-up Smart car that had been put through a crash
test at Calspan was on display.
Higgins said the contract could mean more jobs,
such as for engineers.
Hochul praised
Knotts and John R. Yurtchuk, the executive vice president, as "the kind of
visionaries you wish you could just bottle up and spread you all over this
district. It's amazing what you've done for us."
Calspan has been
a prime contractor on the sampling system program since its inception in the
late 1970s. The company's direct involvement expanded last year when Calspan acquired KHRI LLC, which had acted as a
subcontractor in field operations.
Workers in the field operations, who are now Calspan employees, go to the crash sites and collect data,
as directed by federal officials. "They preserve the accident, and then
our people go in and do forensic analysis," Yurtchuk said. "It's like
CSI for cars."
Yurtchuk, who was part of the team that bought Calspan from General Dynamics for $30 million in 2005, said
additional growth could be coming. Calspan is talking
with government officials about the idea of supporting a $35 million global
transportation safety center at the Cheektowaga location.
Such a center would build on the expertise Calspan already has in vehicle safety testing, to include
vehicle avoidance technology that has become more widely used, Yurtchuk said.
"Nobody in the world really tests those
things, and we want to integrate that into what we already do," he said.
"And I think that would lead to another generation of improvement in
vehicle safety and collision avoidance."
Yurtchuk said establishing such a center would
"create jobs for decades. It's a capital investment whose output is
safety, better vehicles, safer intersections."
Calspan, which is
also involved in both transportation and aeronautics research, has about 210
employees.
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