RE: Boeing wins refueling tanker deal

I'm excited! I currently work on KC-135Rs at March... they're a total POS when it comes to maintaining them. I'm looking forward to someday having a modern airframe to fix!
 
Trans_23 said:
I hope they just get on with making them now. What a dog and pony show this has been.
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This dog and pony show is just geting started. Now the "wing nuts" we call the House and Senate are going to fight over it. They will delay the program another 1 or 2 years only hurting the troops.
 
Idly doodling over my morning cup of coffee...

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No offense to anyone, since it's really none of my business - but it is one of the biggest defence contracts ever, and has been grossly mismanaged.
Perhaps Boeing would be better off running the US Air Force, as they seem to know better...
 
Perhaps Boeing would be better off running the US Air Force, as they seem to know better...
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If the Air Force had managed to put the design specs they wanted in the RFP, maybe there wouldn't be this mess. When the two companies are designing for different specs, someone is going to complain about it when the other company won while designing to the other specs.

Now, I'm not following this any closer than to see that it seems to be some sort of Monkey/Football interaction, but changing the end goal to suit one team over the other smells funny. Either way.

Brian
 
Boeing originally lost the competition because they pushed an inferior product and got beat fair and square. Then they cried fowl through their lobbyists to their Reps and Senators and got a second chance rigged in their favor. It's no secret. Washington State's own kings of monopolization, Microsoft and now Boeing. Oh wait, Boeing moved its corporate HQ to Chicago. How fitting. :applause::applause::applause:
 
Well, I am going to throw it out clear and honest and let the chips fall as they may.

It wasn't really a competition between Boeing and Northrop-Grumman.

Northrop-Grumman was just a wise effort by EADS to put an American face on the contract bid. Nothing wrong with that, but except for the engines and the refueling boom, the rest of that aircraft was pure EADS.

Now, as far as the outcome.

EADS threatened the USAF that unless the original specs were modified to raise the benefits of large cargo throughput (something the USAF did not really want) that EADS would withdraw from the contract bid. The USAF was so desperate to have a competitive bid process that it agreed to EADS's demands (some would say threat). So, the spec's were changed midstream.

This decision wasn't EADS's fault. They just stated their corporate position. Again, nothing wrong with that.

The fault was entirely with the USAF, which should have stuck to its actual desires in the new tanker (voiced originally as "best pure tanker" and allowed EADS to make its ultimate decision to compete or not.

Once the spec's were modified, Boeing came back and asked if the USAF wanted a variant of their 777. The USAF said no, it wanted the spec's for the 757 that Boeing originally submitted to meet the original spec's.

The USAF changed the goal post, failed to honestly tell Boeing what the new goal posts were, and then left Boeing out in the cold when it announced the original decision. Within hours I came here to SOH and predicted that the award would be overturned by the CBO audit and of course I was right. Wasn't any great insight. It was just that the way the USAF handled the contract was so horribly botched that either company could have successfully challenged the award.

So, when the DoD weighed in on the re-do, the USAF decided to again go with their original spec's. EADS again threatened to pull from the bid process. This time the USAF stuck to its original desires and refused to modify the spec's again.

EADS pulled out.

Boeing won the contract by default.

All sorts of nationalistic arguments can be made back and forth. However, what I wrote above is what happened.

Now, going from facts to my opinion, EADS knew their bid did not match up well to the Boeing bid as measured by the original spec's. Therefore, EADS knew the spec's must be modified for them to win. The USAF caved in to the demands, got burned and humiliated, and then when EADS had to compete against the original spec's, concluded with logic that there was no point in them continuing the expense of bidding on the contract. It is a rational choice based upon the millions of dollars required to submit a bid and fly-away demonstrator. If you don't think you can win, it makes perfect sense to fold your cards and save your chips for another hand.

Ken
 
deathfromafar said:
Boeing originally lost the competition because they pushed an inferior product and got beat fair and square. Then they cried fowl through their lobbyists to their Reps and Senators and got a second chance rigged in their favor. It's no secret. Washington State's own kings of monopolization, Microsoft and now Boeing. Oh wait, Boeing moved its corporate HQ to Chicago. How fitting. :applause::applause::applause:
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I dug deep to look into the spec's.

Based on objective numbers, the 757 bid hauled more fuel at less cost, took up less ramp space, and provided greater tanker output than did the EADS bid.

The only spec by which the EADS design was superior was in tonnage of cargo hauled and total numbers of pallets.

Ken
 
The Boeing is actually a 767, not 757. The EADS Tanker carries more offloadable fuel than the 767 carriers in Max Fuel Capacity and the EADS has greater unrefueled range by roughly 350 miles. Yes the Boeing is smaller but both planes are big and will occupy roughly the same ramp space so that is never been a valid issue. The Boeing has about the same ceiling and cruise speeds as well. But in terms of Cargo and Offloadable fuel, hands down the EADS KC-45 wins. The other thing worth mentioning is that EADS was going to turn all of it's A330 Commercial Cargo construction to the US plant. The other thing that seems to have been missed is that the Boeing is a 767-200ER Airframe. The original production of that series ended on 02/24/94. Many of the existing KC-767 airframes are hand-me-down rebuilds. Question is, are the new USAF 767-200 Tankers going to be elderly airframes? I just think this is a very raw deal for not only the Air Force but also the taxpayer. Rumor has it, the entire contract may be scrapped within the next 3 months due to cash constraints.
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Thanks for the above insight and summary Ken, but Boeing was using the 767 for the bid not the 757 which is been out of production for a number of years.

Edit: never mind Deathfromafar beat me to it
 
deathfromafar said:
Rumor has it, the entire contract may be scrapped within the next 3 months due to cash constraints.​
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What after all those years and millions spent on putting submissions together etc it gets cancelled again..what a waste ..glad Im not a US tax payer!...in the meantime you are still left with rapidly aging tankers (not to mention other large chunks of the US Air Foce inventory) ..they cant go on forever.
 
Naki said:
What after all those years and millions spent on putting submissions together etc it gets cancelled again..what a waste ..glad Im not a US tax payer!...in the meantime you are still left with rapidly aging tankers (not to mention other large chunks of the US Air Foce inventory) ..they cant go on forever.
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Suffice to say I don't think any of us would be surprised if this ends up happening based on current events and shortsightedness. We have seen major amounts of money spent on projects only to see them cut short or canceled outright. Bad part is that we end up paying higher unit and eventually overall costs due to lower/cut production numbers.
This Tanker business is a debacle when it should have been cut and dry. To add to what Ken said about the Air Force zig zagging on this, there was as always political influences in the hallowed halls between the lawmakers and the budget warfighters over in the DOD. If you ever dig deep enough into it, it can be bewildering more than enlightening.
 
With no ill will towards the northrop grumman line workers who would've been building it, there is no reason to buy foreign aircraft even if they have advantages. We've all but squandered our once mighty arospace industry and manufacturing capacity. We may not need tens of thousands of airplanes operational at any given time, but we should always retain the capacity to produce them. Buying defense assets from American companies is an investment.

One of my jobs is as the general manager of a general engineering and contracting company. Winning a bid by default is still winning. There are SOOOO many things that can happen, such as changed specs, RFIs, change orders and insider bidding. Sometimes you are only allowed to compete as a gomer bull because management firms know that you can't be competitive, and the competition is truly stiff these days. Major defense acquisitions are already brutally hard and costly these days, the playing field should've been different from the start. The specs should've been the specs, and that should've been it. No specs should've ever been altered based on what companies had to offer, no matter how few people are bidding.

to all: 767s are 757s with fat bodies.
 
I don't think this one gets undone because of the dire need for these tankers. If we don't build them PDQ we might as well shut down the USAF! Our entire aerospace defense effort is built upon the foundations of in-flight refueling.

If it does, then we are frankly screwed as a nation, and I mean in ways we haven't seen since the 1930's. And history had one very tragic and painful lesson to several nations who thought immediate savings on defense spending was a good idea, only to find out within ten years it would have been a frightfully small percentage of the resulting war.

Ken
 
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