Air Force Says To Expect Debrief On Or After March 12

Next week isn't soon enough. That's the message the public relations department at Boeing had this week, as it announced its request for an "immediate debriefing" from US Air Force officials on the KC-X tanker competition.

In its Tuesday announcement, the company said it had yet to receive a briefing on why it was not selected for the KC-X program, a decision the Air Force announced February 29. The Air Force indicated that the briefing would occur on or after March 12 -- a delay Boeing calls "inconsistent with well-established procurement practices."

As ANN reported, the Air Force selected the Airbus-sourced KC-30 tanker, offered by a team comprised of EADS and Northrop Grumman, as the winner in the first phase of the KC-X competition. Boeing had offered its KC-767 -- and many politicians and analysts had expected Boeing's smaller, less-expensive offering to walk away with the contract.

Air Force officials have not publicly detailed the reasons for their decision, but said the EADS aircraft offers significant advantages in a number of areas over the Boeing aircraft. That reasoning -- that the Air Force picked the best plane for its needs -- didn't fly with lawmakers in Washington and Kansas, though, who have called for a slew of actions, including a Congressional inquiry on the decision.

Mark McGraw, Vice President of 767 Tanker Programs at Boeing, opted for a more diplomatic tact -- saying Boeing simply wants to hear the Air Force's reasons for going with the Northrop/EADS bid. But the company wants to hear those reasons sooner than later.

"A delay of this length in the formal debriefing is unusual," said McGraw. "Consistent with past practice and recent experience, we would expect this briefing to occur within days, not weeks, of the selection announcement. Given that we are already seeing press reports containing detailed competitive information, we feel that our request is more than fair and reasonable."

Boeing notes it based its KC-X proposal on the stated criteria in the Air Force's Request For Proposal (RFP), the formal document that defined the requirements for the air tanker system. There has been speculation the Air Force grew increasingly enamored with the idea of a larger tanker -- like the A330-based KC-45A -- as the bidding process went on; in September 2006, Boeing mulled whether to submit a tanker variant of its still-larger 777, but opted to stick close to the RFP guidelines.

"We bid aggressively with specific focus on providing operational tanker capability at low risk and the lowest total life cycle cost," said McGraw. "For instance, based on values disclosed in the Air Force press conference and press release, the Boeing bid, comprising development and all production airplane costs, would appear to be less than the competitor. In addition, because of the lower fuel burn of the 767, we can only assume our offering was more cost effective from a life cycle standpoint.

"Initial reports have also indicated that we were judged the higher risk offering," McGraw added -- an apparent reference to ongoing technical issues, since corrected, that delayed the delivery of Japan's first KC-767 by over a year. That delay was trumpeted by EADS and Northrop during the competition.

"Boeing is a single, integrated company with its assets, people and technology under its own management control -- with 75 years of unmatched experience building tankers," McGraw asserted. "Northrop and EADS are two companies that will be working together for the first time on a tanker, on an airplane they've never built before, under multiple management structures, across cultural, language and geographic divides. We do not understand how Boeing could be determined the higher risk offering.

"Initial reports also indicate there may well have been factors beyond those stated in the RFP, or weighted differently than we understood they would be, used to make the decision. It's important for us to understand how the Air Force reached their conclusion. The questions we are asking, as well as others being raised about this decision, can best be answered with a timely debrief indicating how our proposal was graded against the stated requirements of the RFP," said McGraw.

FMI: www.boeing.com, www.globaltanker.com