Not all of Florida’s aerospace and aviation industries are centered around the appropriately named Space Coast in the Cape Canaveral area.

Here’s a look at four aerospace and aviation companies located in and around Florida’s First Coast North Central Florida.

Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman, a company that designs and manufactures systems for aeronautics, aerospace and defense, is the fifth largest contractor of the U.S. federal government.

The corporation’s Florida presence includes 17 sites with nearly 8,000 employees and 1.3 million square feet of manufacturing space.

Northrop Grumman’s presence in St. Augustine began in 1980, when Grumman Aerospace Corporation established its operations at the St. Augustine Airport. The Northrop Corporation merged with Grumman in 1994, and the company opened its E-2 aircraft production line in St. Augustine that same year – the production line is now the longest-running one in naval aviation history.

A new 400,000-square-foot facility opened in 2015 for the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye program. The Hawkeye is a “force-multiplying,” airborne command, early warning and control aircraft. A Northrop Grumman statement notes that the plane is built “from start to finish in St. Augustine …  more than 30,000 parts come into one end of the building, and a completed aircraft rolls out the other.”

The design and engineering of the aircraft is completed at Northrop Grumman’s Melbourne site. The company is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia.

Boeing

Boeing, one of the world’s largest aerospace manufacturers, the fourth-largest defense contractor in the world, and the largest U.S. exporter (in terms of dollar value), expanded its footprint in September 2025 with the opening of a new engineering facility in Daytona Beach – within the Cici & Hyatt Brown Center for Aerospace Technology at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Initial plans call for Boeing to perform work for military aircraft programs at the 65,000-square-foot site, which includes a 40,000-square-foot hangar. Work will focus on engineering design, research, development, and prototyping capabilities.

The facility will start with approximately 200 high-paying engineering jobs, and Boeing expects to double that workforce to 400 employees over the next several years.

Boeing operates numerous facilities focusing on defense, space and security throughout Florida, including sites in Cape Canaveral, Titusville, Orlando, Jacksonville, Eglin Air Force Base and South Florida.

Daytona-area philanthropists J. Hyatt Brown and his wife Cici donated $25 million to help make the Boeing research facility a reality, and the State of Florida provided $25 million in matching funds.

Boeing was founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. The company merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997.

Amphenol CIT

The roots of Amphenol CIT go back to 1940, when a company known as Tensolite began to manufacture miniature insulated wire and cable, including wire used to electrically heat the gloves and flight suits of World War II Air Force pilots.

In 1959, Tensolite became part of Carlisle Companies, which eventually relocated its operations to St. Augustine in 1987. In 2008, the company morphed into Carlisle Interconnect Technologies (CIT), with its St. Augustine plant specializing in making high-performance wire, cable and connector solutions for the aerospace, military, medical tech and industrial markets.

Amphenol acquired Carlisle in 2024, and the company became known as Amphenol CIT (Cable & Interconnect Technologies). Along with its St. Augustine headquarters, the company has facilities in Wisconsin, Washington, China and Mexico that specialize in various high-tech manufacturing and engineering work.

The St. Augustine facility’s association with NASA began with developing cable, cable assemblies and connectors for the Apollo 11 moon landing mission in 1969. In recent years Amphenol CIT has been a supplier for NASA’s Deep Space Exploration Systems, whose goal is to develop missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.

The St. Augustine facility currently has 640 employees.

GRACE Aerospace

GRACE Aerospace, based in Jacksonville at its 34,000-square-foot facility in the Cecil Commerce Center, is a build-to-print aerospace manufacturer and systems integrator that supports the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA and other large contractors.

Build-to-print is a manufacturing model in which a manufacturer produces parts or components based strictly on engineering designs and specifications provided by a client.

GRACE Aerospace was founded in 2001 in Long Island, New York by Robert Carlo and a group of partners to fulfill a need in Grumman’s F-14 fighter jet program, which initially supplied the U.S. Navy.

Looking to expand their opportunities a decade later, GRACE turned to Florida, home to 2,000 aerospace and aviation companies as well as Naval Air Station Jacksonville, the third-largest naval base in the country.

When GRACE discovered NAS Jax had a need for intricate, custom electronics work that could be turned around quickly, GRACE was able to fulfill that role, and in 2015 the company established a presence in the Jacksonville area. In 2018, Grace Aerospace moved its headquarters from New York to Jacksonville.

Today the company employs approximately 65 people. Pauline Sevigny, daughter of Robert and Laurel Carlo, joined GRACE Aerospace in 2017. She became its president in 2020, and she and her parents now own the company.