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2003 Fantastic 50
Technology: NLX Corp.

by Peter Galuszka
Virginia Business
May 2003

When giant B-52 and sleek B-1 bombers attack Republican Guard units in Iraq, their crews rely on training they got from simulators developed by a small Sterling firm that has sprouted since its founding in 1993. Since then, NLX Corp. has been providing training services and simulators for the defense and civilian sectors, competing for federal contracts against such big name defense contractors as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and CACI International, also headquartered in Northern Virginia.

NLX seems to relish the challenge. It has seen its revenues rise over the past four years by 623.4 percent to $80 million in 2001. From 1998 to the present, the number of employees has more than quadrupled to 575, and the firm has opened branches in Orlando, Fla., Binghamton, N.Y., and Huntsville, Ala.

NLX represents the high technology, software-heavy firms that have come to the fore in Northern Virginia since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Their expertise has helped U.S. armed forces knock off the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and scramble the cohesion of the al-Qaida terrorists. Now, they have been deployed against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Specializing in simulators and using virtual reality software, NLX helps train pilots and aircrews for aircraft as diverse as the Air Force’s RC-135 Joint Stars reconnaissance plane to T-34 and T-35 trainers used by aspiring U.S. Navy aviators. It is helping train crews on the Army’s Blackhawk and Chinook workhorse helicopters and crews on the Navy’s E-2C Hawkeye radar planes. “We’ve gotten a big boost from defense,” says J. Anthony Syme, the 42 year-old CEO and president, who graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering from Virginia Tech in 1983.

Nor are NLX’s efforts aimed exclusively at aircraft. Last November, the firm won a $5.1 million contract from the Navy to develop a tactical visual training system to help submarines know what’s above them as they return to the ocean surface. The Navy saw the need for such as system after the February 2001 accident in which attack submarine USS Greenville surfaced too quickly and collided with a Japanese fishing trawler near Hawaii, killing nine. The NLX system can help crew members train with three-dimensional simulators that can imitate calm seas or major storms, helping them anticipate dangers when they peer through periscopes before maneuvering their vessel.

The unsettling world events of the past two years, however, have hurt as well as helped. Despite the boosts in military contracts, NLX has suffered as terrorist threats and other causes have sapped America’s commercial air carriers and led several to bankruptcy, Syme says. “From 2001 to 2002, our revenues fell on our commercial side, but they’ve been offset by gains on the defense side,” he says. Plus, defense has become a tougher market. A competitor, Arlington-based CACI International, for instance, snared a $100 million combat and services training contract from the Army in late March.

Even so, Syme says that first quarter revenues this year are growing substantially and that NLX is looking at filling 25 new spots — a rarity for a technology company these days. One growing market is civilian aviation, Syme says. While large civilian carriers are in deep financial trouble, prospects are bright for smaller, regional passenger airlines or for larger airlines along their middle- and small-city routes. They use smaller airplanes made by such firms as Canada’s Bombardier. NLX will manufacture the simulator for Bombardier’s newest business jet, the Continental, along with its Challenger 300 plane. Most of its simulators are of the most sophisticated, six-degrees-of-movement-type approved by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Syme, who worked at General Dynamics in Ft. Worth, Texas, and other companies before he helped found NLX, says that Northern Virginia is a good place for a company like this. “There’s just so much engineering and technical talent around here,” he says.

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