Rolls-Royce to close Prince George County factory, laying off nearly 300 workers

John Reid Blackwell 4 hrs ago

The Rolls-Royce aircraft component factory in Prince George County will close and lay off hundreds of employees by the middle of 2021, a victim of the economic fallout and collapse in global travel resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company plans to shutter the factory in the Crosspointe office park near Interstate 295 by mid-next year, putting 280 employees out of work, a spokesman for Rolls-Royce North America confirmed Saturday.

The job losses come on top of 120 layoffs at the factory — the first Rolls-Royce manufacturing facility built from the ground up in the U.S. — that took place in June.

The factory, which opened in 2011 on a 1,000-acre site in Prince George, had reached peak employment of about 400 people last year. It makes precision aircraft components such as rotative discs and turbine blades.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a historic collapse in civil aviation, which will take several years to recover. As a result, we’ve had to make difficult, but necessary, decisions to protect the future of our business,” Rolls-Royce North America spokesman Don Campbell said in a statement.

Rolls-Royce, a British company with its North American headquarters in Reston, has cut its workforce elsewhere worldwide as it deals with the travel slump that’s drastically shrunk the aviation market.

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The Rolls-Royce factory was announced with great fanfare in November of 2007, with state and local government officials proclaiming it a major economic development victory for Virginia as a greenfield site — a large manufacturing campus involving the construction of an entirely new, high-tech factory on rural land in an area of the state in need of high-paying manufacturing jobs.

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jblackwell@timesdispatch.com

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