Posted on 08/22/2008 12:12:17 PM PDT by Toddsterpatriot
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Boeing Co. is considering bailing out of a politically charged competition for a $35 billion contract to build aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force, if it does not receive an additional four months from the Pentagon to assemble its offer. ADVERTISEMENT
The aerospace manufacturer said Friday it also may file a protest on the final bids request -- expected to be released early next week by the Pentagon -- which could further delay an award. No final decision will be made until Boeing has a chance to review the final bids request, said company spokesman Daniel Beck.
"It's very clear to us this is a new competition," said Beck. "Clearly, the requirements have changed and the Defense Department is essentially asking for a different kind of plane from the first competition."
(Excerpt) Read more at biz.yahoo.com ...
Ping!
Maybe they should just negotiate a formal licensing agreement: “Boeing: Official Supplier to Team USA for the 2009 Tehran Air Games.” ;)
How many years have they been working on this now? I guess appreciation of value is hard to compute.
I guess their whine was for show, realizing they lost on the merits, but there were enough screwups in the AF’s methodology that they won the protest. Ruh roh, what do we do now?
It’s a bluff. Call the waaa-mbulance.
I think the problem is that Boeing over the 767 tanker based on mis-information from the USAF. The Air Force said that they wanted a smaller tanker and so that’s why Boeing offered the 767, but then they went with the A330, which is larger.
If Boeing wants to win this competition, they should offer a 777 tanker. The 777 is bigger, faster, fly-by-wire, has more powerful engines, has more capacity, etc. It would blow the A330 right out of the water!
There could be a thousand different things going on in the procurement. One of them could be that Boeing does not trust the Air Force (or this section of the Air Force) to run a straight up procurement. That is, it costs a whole lot of money to bid. In this case $100 million? That’s money well spent, even if you lose, if the procurement is “fair”. I mean 1. honest and 2. following clear and predictable guidelines. If the guidelines/requirements are constantly shifting, even an honest (non-wired) procurement is a lousy way to spend your bid money.
I once worked for a hgh tech firm in Northern Virginia. The USPS put out an RFP. My cmpany spent $10 mill bidding, the competitor about $6.5 mill. At about the end, the Postal Service said: Sorry, bad idea.
It did serious damage to our company, and the competor, too. Of course, neither ever dealt with the Postal Service again, and the Postal Service just bought IBM mainframes at list price thereafter. No other vendor would touch them on something big for a long time.
Doing a bad procurement hurts businesses, but it also hurts the Federal agency too. Or at least it costs the taxpayer a lot more.
I believe this is simply a gambit to possibly buy a little more time. Boeing complained that the time to respond to the updated request for proposal is inadequate to write a 777-based proposal - only about a month. If they can drag this process out until the next administration, they may be able to get enough pressure on Congress and possibly from the executive branch to force the award of the contract to Boeing. In such a case, they win, regardless of collateral damage such as making the military wait another year to start replacing its aging tanker fleet.
The U.S. Air Farce is so screwed up they can’t find right from wrong.
It’s an internal cultural of corruption and self and double dealing.
Some of them have gone to jail.
Some of them need to go to jail.
I imagine that the good guys there are in the swamps of DC are outnumbered and outgunned and just about ready to quit.
The Iron Triangle has won.
Sad . . .
You are EXACTLY right!! Airbust said they were going to pull out of the INITIAL proposal & the Air Farce made CONCESSIONS to Airbust. The whole proceedure was tilted to Airbus, all Boeing wanted to do is have a FAIR competition. All one has to do is read the merits of the case & why Boeing WON its protest to see the “rules & product description” were changed WITHOUT BOEING being “privvy” to that info thus tilting the process to Airbus. But alas, those who know little of the circumstances are the loudest pontificaors for Airbus. When has it ever made sense to OUT SOURCE ones national Defense? Only an OBAMA supporter could make sense out of a choice like this!!
Boeing actually has a case here. In the original RFP it stated that the airframe that is be bid must be capable of landing on certain size airfields. Boeing complied with the RFP requirement, Airbus ignored that requirement and bid a larger aircraft that could not land on some of the required airfields. That was part of the original challenge. After the challenge the AF modified this requirement and so Boeing is saying they need a few more months to look at bidding an airframe of comparable size to the Airbus airframe.
I thought it was an unwritten law that however mundane, any post of any aircraft news must include a t least 1 pic of the aircraft involved....unless of course its using its cloaking device at the time of the picture in which case its irrelevant. :^)
Except for that pesky requirement requiring operation from a 7000' airstrip.
The 767-200 was the only Boeing bird that could do that,which is why Boeing went with it.
Not true. The Requirement is to operate out of a 7,000' runway, which all versions of the 777 can do.
An objective was to operate out of a 7,000' runway at MTOW, which no 777 can do.
However, it is ludicrous to think that Boeing will offer the 777, since the production line is sold out and Boeing couldn't deliver a prototype in the contract specified time.
Plus, if the KC-30 was too big, then then a KC-777 would be huge. If the KC-30 couldn't operate out of forward bases because of tarmac strength, then even fewer fields will be available to the KC-777. If the KC-30 cost about the same as the KC-767AT, then the KC-777 will be tens of millions more expensive per copy.
The KC-777 is very good as a replacement for the KC-10 when the KC-Z contract is let, but not for the KC-X.
It has always come down to either the KC-767AT or the KC-30, and Boeing knew it. That is why they developed the "AT," to try to address their known shortcomings when compared to the KC-30.
The Air Force chose between the two types offered, and given the almost identical costs, went with the bigger of the two.
The Machineist’s Union is doing that as we speak.
Agreed. That was the basic conclusion of Loren Thompson, of the Lexington Institute, perhaps one of the most respected private sector defense analysists.
Which it didn't. It cost $5.2 billion more for acquisition, which the USAF procurement team fudged over by arbitrarily increasing the "costs" of the Boeing bid...by imputing cost-growth from satellite programs...
That is one thing they can't do this go around, because they have stated they will abide by the Congressional intent to separate ...and openly compare...the respective acquision, as opposed to operations costs. So less opportunity for future fudging.
Actually, the KC-30 is clearly more of a KC-10 replacement, albeit slower, less capable, and more space consuming.
The KC-X was supposed to explicitly be a KC-135 replacement. It was supposed to be basically smaller.
An objective was to operate out of a 7,000' runway at MTOW, which no 777 can do.
Perhaps not. But at MTOW, neither can the KC-30. That is a fact. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Jed Babbin noted: Tanker Decision Driven By Faulty Data
And the ACTUAL respective capabilities imply that the KC-767 is significantly more capable in terms of field utility.
However, it is ludicrous to think that Boeing will offer the 777, since the production line is sold out and Boeing couldn't deliver a prototype in the contract specified time.
Shouldn't prove necessary. The Congress will decide. But your point, such as it is, implies that they should simply expand their production line to their main plant at Everett, since the 747 line is running slow. This is in fact do-able. And they already have all the tooling that they can easily replicate for such expansion. They just need firm reliable. orders.
But that is the real glitch. The EADs team has been chafing at the bit for money from the USAF...saying it can deliver much sooner than Boeing...which is something of a Red Herring...because in fact, the USAF knew it couldn't pony up the money any faster than the RFP laid out. That was why the USAF went with the lease deal in the first place...it didn't call for a whole lot of up front money. Money they still can't scrape up. Hence the very slow roll-out they proposed in their RFPs.
Here, we are agreed.
But as you have implied...this was not supposed to be a program of KC-10 "Strategic Tanker" replacement...
Maybe the lease deal should not have been torpedoed. It clearly would have been less spendy than what EADs is going to be charging...so much for it "costing" $6 billion too much.
In point of fact: The Congress wasn't about to pay for the planes in a normal acquisitions process...they were already complaining about the F-22. The lease deal had the virtue of Boeing fronting the costs of production itself so long as it had the lease orders. The USAF would have had far more planes far sooner. And ultimately, as has now been proved... for less.
The acquision costs for both proposals were almost identical. If Boeing changes to a KC-767-400, their development and unit costs will go up even more.
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