A company making parts for aeroplane engines is looking to axe 251 jobs because of a collapse in flights after the September 11 terrorist attack.

AETC Ltd, which also produces parts for industrial gas turbines, currently employs 685 people at its site at Yeadon Airport Industrial Estate, pictured, on Harrogate Road.

The firm, which helped produce some of the world's earliest gas turbine engines, has entered into a 90-day consultation period to try to limit the number of redundancies.

AETC, which was acquired by US firm PCC in 1996, makes a variety of products including rotating blades for aircraft engines. The company started in the 1940s as a sub-contracting manufacturing division of Hepworth & Grandage, now known as Bradford-based piston manufacturer Federal-Mogul.

It enjoyed rapid growth and moved to its present site in 1950.

AETC owns another site in Leicester, where 200 people are employed.

The proposed redundancies, including management and manufacturing staff, will all be made at Yeadon.

More than half of the firm's products are exported to overseas customers. It counts Rolls-Royce, Vickers and Pratt & Whitney Canada Corporation among its clients.

Ian Dorman, human resources manager at the firm, said: "This is a direct result of the continuing problems in the aerospace industry and cutbacks in our industrial gas turbine company.

"I think the size of the problem is such that we cannot rule out job losses. We are facing serious market problems."

One worker with the firm for more than 20 years, who did not want to be named, said: "It's frightening for everybody. Nobody feels safe.

"There's a last-in, first-out policy with the union, but with so many jobs to be cut nobody knows what will happen to them."

In 1993 hundreds lost their jobs after the firm lost out on a contract with Rolls Royce to an overseas firm.