Collins Aerospace Brand Guidelines: A 1933 Cedar Rapids Radio Name Inside RTX

A radio company in Cedar Rapids.

The Collins name is older than the company that carries it. Arthur A. Collins founded the Collins Radio Company in 1933 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, English Wikipedia says, to design and build shortwave radio equipment and transmitters for the AM broadcast industry. In its first year Collins equipment provided a communications link with the South Pole expedition of Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, and by the late 1930s the firm was selling audio consoles and broadcast transmitters, among them the 300E and 300F.

The Second World War turned the firm into a military supplier. English Wikipedia says Collins became the principal supplier of radio and navigation equipment used by the US military during the war; its high-power aircraft transmitters included the ART-13, which had automatic tuning circuits. After the war the company sold to broadcasters and to radio amateurs, with receivers such as the 75A series and the later S/Line, and it designed the R-390 receiver for the US military around 1950.

The postwar company moved into flight-control instruments and space communications. Collins equipment was used for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes, English Wikipedia says, and in 1973 for communications on Skylab. That same year, after financial difficulties, the company was bought by Rockwell International. The Collins name survived inside Rockwell as its avionics business, and in 2001 that division was spun off as a separately listed company, Rockwell Collins, still based in Cedar Rapids.

Two suppliers, one name.

Rockwell Collins grew by acquisition. English Wikipedia lists purchases including in-flight entertainment businesses around 2000, the aviation communications company ARINC in 2014 and the cabin-interiors maker B/E Aerospace in 2017. Its work centred on avionics for airliners, business jets and military aircraft.

The other half of today’s company came from Connecticut. United Technologies Corporation formed UTC Aerospace Systems in August 2012, English Wikipedia says, by merging its existing subsidiary Hamilton Sundstrand with the newly acquired Goodrich Corporation; the combined business was headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Goodrich brought landing gear, nacelles and other aircraft systems, as well as the satellite-equipment maker Ithaco, which built reaction wheels for spacecraft including Kepler and Dawn.

United Technologies agreed to buy Rockwell Collins in September 2017 and completed the purchase in November 2018, English Wikipedia says. It then merged the two aerospace businesses into one, named Collins Aerospace, keeping the radio founder’s surname and the Charlotte headquarters. In 2020 United Technologies merged with Raytheon Company to form Raytheon Technologies, which later renamed itself RTX Corporation. RTX now presents three businesses on its website: Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney and Raytheon.

The Collins Aerospace website, run on RTX’s web platform under the line “Aerospace Redefined,” groups its work by market: commercial aviation, business aviation, military and defence, helicopters, space and airports. Its product pages run from the Pro Line Fusion flight deck and head-up displays to landing gear, wheels and brakes, nacelle systems, aircraft seating and space suits. That breadth reflects the merger: avionics and communications from the Collins side, structures and mechanical systems largely from the Goodrich and Hamilton Sundstrand side.

Suppliers behind the airframe.

Aerospace suppliers sell to a small number of buyers, and their imagery is built for engineers, airlines and investors rather than for passengers. The product is usually hidden inside someone else’s aircraft, so the pictures tend to show it before it disappears: an engine bolted to a test stand, a single fan blade lit in a studio, a fuselage section on a factory floor, or a cutaway drawing that opens up the layers of a turbofan or a landing-gear leg.

Factories are part of the story. Clean rooms, composite lay-up tables and long assembly halls appear again and again, often with people in them: apprentices, engineers and technicians in overalls, shown at work rather than posing. Many of these companies are joint ventures, partners or subcontractors on the same programmes, so a single engine or wing can carry the work of several firms, each telling its own part of it.

The trade has its own stages. The Paris Air Show at Le Bourget and the Farnborough show in England alternate year by year, and suppliers take chalets and stands there alongside the aircraft makers they serve. Services after delivery are a large part of the business too, and the language of aftermarket support, spare parts and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) runs through their websites and reports.

Corporate reports often put an aircraft on the cover, even when the company makes none of it. Behind that shared look sit very different histories: century-old engine makers, plants sold off by aircraft builders, conglomerate spin-outs and private-equity buyouts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each one, and mark clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A founder’s surname on an aerospace group.

The business has kept changing shape since 2018. In August 2021 Collins Aerospace announced it had acquired FlightAware, the flight-tracking data company, English Wikipedia says. In July 2023 Collins agreed to sell its flight control and actuation business to France’s Safran; Aviation International News reported on 21 July 2025 that Safran had completed the purchase, two years after the deal was announced, and that the business had become part of Safran Electronics & Defense.

Collins’s airport software drew wide attention in September 2025. Reuters reported on 20 September 2025 that a cyberattack on a provider of check-in and boarding systems had disrupted operations at London Heathrow, Brussels and Berlin airports, with Dublin and Cork also affected; RTX said it was aware of a “cyber-related disruption” to its MUSE software at selected airports and that the impact was limited to electronic check-in and bag drop, which could be handled manually.

That airport business is now set to leave the group. On 15 October 2026, AeroTime reported, the Geneva-based air transport IT provider SITA announced an agreement to acquire Collins Aerospace Airport Solutions, the unit behind check-in and self-service kiosks, bag drop and airport operations systems. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals; it had not been completed at the time of writing. The rest of Collins Aerospace remains part of RTX.

As a name, Collins Aerospace carries a person rather than a place or an abbreviation. The surname of a radio engineer from Iowa now sits on flight decks, landing gear and seats made by businesses that began as Goodrich, Hamilton Sundstrand and B/E Aerospace, while Rockwell, the name that once stood before it, has been dropped.

For a design guide, Collins Aerospace shows how one founder’s surname can be stretched across a merged supplier group. Compare Honeywell, another American avionics and systems name built on a surname, and Parker Hannifin, another long-established American aerospace systems supplier. For this guide we use a navy and an altitude blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Collins Aerospace’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.