Kaman Corporation

Kaman was founded in a Connecticut garage in December 1945 by Charles Kaman, a rotor aerodynamicist who solved a vibration problem and built a helicopter company around the answer. Eighty years later the helicopters are the smallest part of it. The company still lives in Bloomfield, Connecticut with roughly 2,000 employees, but it stopped being a listed public company in April 2024 when the private equity firm Arcline Investment Management took it private in an all-cash deal valued at about 1.8 billion dollars. That followed an earlier reshaping in 2019, when the large industrial distribution arm was sold to Littlejohn for around 700 million dollars, leaving behind a group of engineered products businesses that sell components into other people's aircraft, missiles, medical devices and machinery.

What is left sells components rather than finished platforms. Seven businesses sit under the corporation, several of which trade under their own brand names, which makes the group harder to follow than its size suggests. Kamatics is the core of it, making self-lubricating bearings and driveline couplings that go into most Western helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. RWG builds standard and custom bearings for commercial and military aerospace, and GRW in Germany supplies high precision miniature bearings into medical, dental, industrial and aerospace uses. Bal Seal Engineering, the largest acquisition in the group's history, makes spring energised seals, canted coil springs and electrical contacts, a quietly critical product line in implantable medical devices and connectors. EXTEX Engineered Products supplies certified aftermarket replacement parts for engines, helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, which is a distribution and certification business rather than a design one.

Two units that used to carry most of the defense content have left. Kaman's own site now states that Kaman Precision Products and Kaman Composites are separate companies. The first was the Middletown, Connecticut fuzing business behind the Joint Programmable Fuze for US and allied air-delivered bombs, and it now trades as Precision Fuzing. The second, the aerostructures shop, has gone back to its old name of Vermont Composites. Anyone reading an older profile of Kaman will find both described as core segments, and they no longer are. Kaman Measuring rounds out the industrial side with non-contact displacement and speed measurement for applications where nothing can touch the thing being measured. Kaman Air Vehicles is the remnant of the original business and the most visible. Production of the K-MAX intermeshing rotor helicopter was discontinued in January 2023 on low demand and thin margins, but the unmanned K-MAX TITAN, first flown in April 2021, carried the autonomy work forward, and Kaman still supports the K-MAX and SH-2G Super Seasprite fleets in service. The KARGO UAV expeditionary resupply aircraft, which flew at full scale in December 2023, is no longer a Kaman product. Piasecki Aircraft bought the program in April 2025.