Apr. 6—A Honesdale-based engineering firm that previously landed contracts with the Army, Air Force and NASA will ready the Navy for battle.

Through a five-year agreement worth $25 million that started Wednesday, Kitty Hawk Technologies will conduct warfare analysis and digital modeling for the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Dahlgren Division.

Kitty Hawk employs 42 people between locations in Honesdale; Huntsville, Alabama; and King George, Virginia, including 25 in Wayne County.

Dave Suhosky, president and CEO of Kitty Hawk Technologies, anticipates bringing on another 40 to 48 more employees by the end of the year.

"Part of what the government is paying us to do is getting the right people," he said. "We're coming on to provide people who can design models, run simulations and evaluate their effectiveness."

As the Department of Defense experienced increased costs for development and testing, they've been trying to represent all the combat, weapons and sensor systems in a digital model environment, Suhosky said.

"Rather than spending tens and hundreds of millions of dollars and running exercises against real threats and targets, you're able to do it in a digital environment and run it a thousand times," he said. "You don't need to have ships at sea firing missiles at targets."

Kitty Hawk's experts will help Navy leadership field, employ and deploy the weapons and tactics necessary to overcome modern threats, Suhosky added.

Technological advances created more opportunities for companies like Kitty Hawk to land military contracts.

"Up until recently, the only people who could do that were giant corporations that invested tens of millions of dollars in supercomputing capability," Suhosky said. "It opened up because of the evolution of the tools. It allows small businesses to compete in a field where it used to be solely dominated by the larger Raytheons and Boeings."

Mary Beth Wood, executive director of the Wayne Economic Development Corporation, praised Kitty Hawk for the level of expertise on display in Northeast Pennsylvania.

"We have a company doing major technology work for our armed forces and other entities right here in Honesdale Borough," she said. "This significant award is going to continue with job creation and retention. These are the types of jobs we love to grow here with those technology focuses."

Kitty Hawk celebrated its 10th anniversary last week and Suhosky said the $25 million will allow the small business to keep growing.

"It ensures our viability and success for the short term and allows us to invest in other things that continue to make us a competitor across the Navy, DOD and industry," he said.

Suhosky, a retired Navy pilot, chose Kitty Hawk Technologies as the business name in honor of the Wright Brothers' test site in North Carolina — the birthplace of aviation. He was also deployed with the USS Kitty Hawk in the 1980s.

Contact the writer: rtomkavage@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9131; @rtomkavage on Twitter.