By Courtney E. Howard

BELLEVUE, Wash. - Esterline Corp. in Bellevue, Wash., has entered into an agreement to acquire CMC Electronics Inc., an aerospace/defense avionics company based in Saint-Laurent, Ontario, in exchange for approximately $335 million Canadian in cash.

CMC designs, manufactures, sells, and supports high-technology electronics products for aviation, including global positioning systems, head-up displays, enhanced vision systems, electronic flight bags, and flight management systems. The company employs more than 1,100 people-of which more than 400 are engineers-at its offices in Montreal, Quebec; Ottawa, Ontario; and Chicago, Ill. For the 12 months ended September 30, 2006, CMC recorded revenues of $205 million Canadian.

The transaction marks the significant expansion of Esterline’s existing Avionics & Controls business. Esterline is a global supplier to the aerospace and defense industry specializing in Avionics & Controls, Sensors & Systems, and Advanced Materials.

“CMC is a premier systems integrator of high-technology avionics, and is a natural evolution following our successful performance as a Tier I supplier to Boeing for the 787 cockpit Overhead Panel System,” Robert W. Cremin, Esterline’s chief executive officer, says. “[The transaction] takes us a long way in adding to the tool kit of solutions that we are assembling for our avionics customers. Together, we’ll forge a much stronger technological presence in this market segment-clearly we’ll be in a position to do more for our customers,” continues Cremin, who considers CMC to have a strong engineering and technology base.

For more information, visit Esterline Corp. and CMC Electronics online at www.esterline.com and www.cmcelectronics.ca, respectively.