Published: Friday, March 7, 2008
Boeing still has ‘significant’ concerns on tanker bid
Herald staff
The Boeing Co. will take the weekend to mull over “serious concerns” it still has after learning more about why it lost a $35 billion Air Force deal.
Company and Pentagon officials met Friday to discuss the details of a deal that left the future of Boeing’s commercial 767 jet in doubt. Last week, the Air Force selected a tanker offered by Northrop Grumman and EADS over Boeing’s KC-767. The Chicago-based Boeing has 10 days to lodge a formal protest.
“We spent several hours with Air Force leaders, listening and probing, all in an effort to better understand the reasoning behind their decisions,” said Mark McGraw, Boeing vice president and program manager of the KC-767 tanker. “While we are grateful for the timely debriefing, we left the room with significant concerns about the process in several areas, including program requirements related to capabilities, cost and risk; evaluation of the bids and the ultimate decision.”
Earlier this week, Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, released a report suggesting that Northrop-EADS won the competition decisively. The duo will assemble a tanker based off of an Airbus commercial A330 in Mobile, Ala. EADS is the parent company of Airbus.
Boeing’s McGraw disagreed with Thompson’s assessment.
“What is clear now is that reports claiming that the Airbus offering won by a wide margin could not be more inaccurate,” said McGraw.
Boeing, which supplied the Air Force with the KC-135 tankers scheduled to be replaced, had been favored widely by analysts to win.
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