BRISTOL — Bauer CEO Lou Auletta runs a company that ensures planes and their passengers fly safely to their destinations. While stressful, that's not what keeps him up all night.
Practically speaking, he and his employees have had to burn the midnight oil as a result of the global tariff war, and he is up in the air along with everyone else when it comes to guessing what's next.
With Bauer named the national exporter of the year in March by the U.S. Small Business Administration, Auletta led a Friday tour of the company's Bristol headquarters plant. Bauer makes complex machines there that cost anywhere from $1 million to $3 million each. Airlines and aircraft industry manufacturers use them to test aircraft components, such as fuel nozzles and landing gear systems, before they are installed on new planes or undergo overhauls.
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Asked about the impact of tariffs, Auletta said there has been negligible impact on purchases for Bauer machines, but that two Chinese companies put in a recent request to ship systems ahead of schedule — five days in advance of a White House implementation date for tariffs that prompted reciprocal levies by China.
"The equipment wasn't complete — it was about 90% complete, and it was about $4.5 million worth of equipment," Auletta said. "We had to have a full crew work through the weekend and nearly around the clock — 40 people — to dissemble, package and put about 80,000 pounds of equipment onto five tractor-trailers to New York and onto a cargo plane."
Bauer will be booking plane tickets for employees in the coming weeks to head over to China where they'll complete assembly of the two machines put into rush-order mode. A third machine remains under assembly in Bristol for eventual shipment to China.
"We're going to have to determine what it is going to cost to finish it, we are going to have to negotiate with the customers to cover those costs, and we are going to have to plan and schedule this whole thing," Auletta told CT Insider on Friday. "And it's going to be a distraction, because while we have the crew over in China doing the work that's supposed to be done here, they are not going to be available here to work on new projects."
It's the kind of response that won Bauer the "U.S. Exporter of the Year" award from the Small Business Administration. On Friday, SBA hosted a ceremony for Bauer and other 2025 Connecticut honorees, just up Century Drive in Bristol from Bauer's headquarters plant in the shadow of an elevator test tower facility operated by Otis Elevator, based in Farmington.
"The excellence in manufacturing — we can see it in what [they] do and the importance ... to aerospace," said Catherine Marx, district director in the Hartford office of SBA, speaking on the production floor of Bauer on Friday. Bauer "has utilized our Export Working Capital Program which offers the ability for companies ... to work through some of the challenges of transactional, exporting challenges."
The East Hartford-based aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney turned to Bauer in the 1930s to develop systems that could test the durability of aircraft components in temperature extremes. They remain Bauer customers today along with fellow RTX subsidiary, Collins Aerospace.
The systems tested by Bauer equipment are critical to aircraft during takeoff, flight and landing, including machines that test nozzles that control the amount of fuel funneled into a jet engine — a single point of failure with no back-up option — or the landing gear for F-35 fighter jets that must hold up in hard landings on aircraft carriers at sea, or in extreme conditions at desert air bases.
Today, Bauer is one of just three major suppliers of the machines used to test the systems manufactured for aircraft, covering most of an airplane save for avionics and related cockpit systems. The other two companies are located in Michigan and Austria, with those rivals likewise getting buffeted to a degree by tariff turbulence in the global economy.
Auletta said Bauer has yet to see any significant impact from increased costs of components that go into its own machines, many of which are made by U.S. manufacturers whether in Connecticut or other states. But the uncertainty is cascading into customer decisions on purchases, with possible implications for Bauer's business for any extended stretch of rapid-fire changes to tariff policy.
"It's a pain," Auletta said.
Tariff pains are evident to Paul Lavoie across Connecticut, as he makes the rounds in his role as chief manufacturing officer in Gov. Ned Lamont's administration.
"There's this myth that tariffs are paid for by consumers," Lavoie told CT Insider. "For large manufacturers of automobiles and some other companies that may be true, but when you go to small- and medium-sized manufacturers, these tariffs are sometimes absorbed by these companies because they can't just raise prices. If they raise prices, they may lose a customer — and they can't do that."
While Lavoie said he knows examples of Connecticut companies that have benefited in the tariff standoff by picking up extra business from customers pivoting away from overseas manufacturers, he has heard from some companies as well that have real fears of going out of business, as some of their customers rethink whether to push ahead with prior plans for spending.
It is not the only risk Auletta has grappled with in recent years along with his brother Mark Auletta, chief operating officer. When Bauer orders went into free fall during the COVID-19 pandemic, they used the downtime to double the size of the Bristol headquarters factory, betting that passenger travel would rebound quickly. Today, the production floor is crammed with machines for their customers as well as the huge systems required by Bauer to make the parts for that equipment.
Auletta said that regardless of how the global tariff war shakes out, Bauer will make any needed adjustments and work its way through any scenarios that arise, as it did for its two customers in China.
Bauer, with 110 employees all in Bristol, has flags hanging high over its factory floor of countries where its customers are located, with China's flag visible as well as those of Canada, Brazil, France and other countries with airlines or aircraft manufacturers.
Over a door is another kind of flag — that of the U.S. Space Force, which Lou Auletta said reflects Bauer's interest in selling test equipment to companies that fly beyond the atmosphere.
"We definitely would like to get more involved in space," Auletta said. "We have one member of our sales team in a business development role who is putting effort into that."