by Aamer Madhani
After being debriefed by the Air Force today, Chicago-based Boeing Co. officials are sounding like they are going to protest the service’s decision to pass them up on the $35 billion contract to overhaul the Air Force’s ageing aerial refueling tanker fleet.
Last week, the Air Force awarded the mammoth contract to a consortium of Northrop Grumman and the French-owned European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co.
Boeing met today for several hours with top Air Force acquisition officials. Company officials will be spending the weekend pondering whether to file a formal protest—something that would further delay the long languishing project.
“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,” Mark McGraw, a Boeing vice president overseeing the tanker project said in a statement. “What is clear now is that reports claiming that the Airbus offering won by a wide margin could not be more inaccurate.” The original contract was awarded to Boeing in 2003, but was later annulled. An ethics scandal with the project led to jail time for a top Boeing official and a former Air Force official accused of giving the company preferential treatment before she was employed by Boeing.
Since the Air Force made the shocking announcement last week, several lawmakers have spoken out against the Air Force’s decision and complained that the service is giving away American jobs to Europe.
The lawmakers, including some with Boeing manufacturing plants in their districts, claim that Boeing and EADS are not competing on a level playing field.
The United State has an ongoing suit against EADS in the World Trade Organization for receiving subsidies from European governments. The European Commission has made similar complaints against Boeing.
Boeing says if it won the contract, the project would support 44,000 jobs, and Northrop-EADS says as many 25,000 jobs will stay in the U.S. under their proposal. None of those jobs, however, are set in stone.
Several Democratic lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jack Murtha and Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, have criticized the presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain for his role in overturning the original deal. McCain had insisted that the bidding be opened to competition after the ethics violations surfaced.
Now, Boeing has to decide whether or not to stop the deal. They have five days from today to make their decision. A possible consequence of choosing to protest is backlash from European governments who account for a significant portion of their customer base.
“Our plan now is to work through the weekend to come to a decision on our course of action early next week,” McGraw saud. “It will be a very rigorous and deliberative process to ensure we’re balancing the needs of the warfighter with our desire to be treated fairly. For decades Boeing has been recognized as a defense company that never takes lightly protests of our customers’ decisions.”
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