Why didn't favored Boeing win Air Force tanker contract?
By Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers
* Posted on Saturday, March 15, 2008
WASHINGTON — The question had been whispered up and down Capitol Hill corridors in the days after the Air Force chose a European plane rather than a Boeing one to replace the nation's fleet of aging aerial-refueling tankers.
Rep. Norm Dicks finally asked it.
"Some people are saying Boeing was arrogant, discourteous?" the Washington state Democrat asked Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne.
"All my dealings with Boeing were objective and professional," Wynne responded.
Wynne didn't elaborate. Dicks didn't press.
At congressional hearings over the past two weeks, Wynne and other Air Force officials have defended the $35 billion tanker contract time and again, saying that the competition was fair, open and legal.
But plenty of questions remain unanswered about why Boeing didn't get a contract that it had been heavily favored to win. They include:
* Did the Air Force make critical changes in the final bid proposal and a computer model used to evaluate the bids that ended up throwing the contract to Northrop Grumman and the European Aerospace Defense and Space Co., the parent company of Boeing's rival, Airbus?
* Did the Boeing Co. misread crucial signals about the contract because of a strained relationship with the Air Force after a 5-year-old procurement scandal that sent two people to jail and led to the resignation of the company's chief executive?
* Was Boeing's commercial airplane division so fixated on the sexy new 787 Dreamliner that producing 12 to 15 stodgy old 767s a year for the Air Force became secondary?
* Did the Boeing defense team, convinced that it would win, get out-hustled by Northrop-EADS, which according to Air Force officials brought its "A game" to the competition?
* Did the Pentagon buckle under pressure from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who demanded that there be more than one bidder even if it meant that the Air Force couldn't consider the estimated billions of dollars in possibly illegal government subsidies that the European plane manufacturer received? And how will McCain's involvement play out as he campaigns for president in states such as Ohio and Michigan, which already have seen jobs exported, and Washington, Kansas and Missouri, where Boeing has plants?
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