Northrop/EADS Beats Boeing For Tanker Contract / KC-45 Contract Awarded

[PV-1]

Boeing's argument pertains to crew survivability in the event the airplane is hit by hostile fire. I believe it has to do with the crew's ability to escape a crippled aircraft.

I can't remember if I read it here on the forums first, but I do know they ain't using parachutes anymore in the 135's.

[source] AirForceTimes

I don't know if that would carry over to the new tankers.

[seahawk]

Boeing's argument pertains to crew survivability in the event the airplane is hit by hostile fire. I believe it has to do with the crew's ability to escape a crippled aircraft.

Which is stupid btw. Even todays KC-135 do not carry chutes for the crew and there is no recorded successful jump from a tanker in history. I mean that thing is a flying FAE.

[AerLingusA330]

Boeing are just getting on like big children over this, they have plenty of other problems to worry about at the minute aka the 787 & 747i, getting a new tanker contract would add more to there problems, i just heard not sure if this is correct, but Italy air force 767 is delayed 2 years because of production, the only delay the A330 had was becasue the RAAF changed there mind, and wanted something else changed.

[PV-1]

Boeing are just getting on like big children over this, they have plenty of other problems to worry about at the minute aka the 787 & 747i, getting a new tanker contract would add more to there problems, i just heard not sure if this is correct, but Italy air force 767 is delayed 2 years because of production, the only delay the A330 had was becasue the RAAF changed there mind, and wanted something else changed.

Well, it's not like Airbus/EADS doesn't have its own issues to worry about.
Document Details Insider Trading Claims at Airbus

And I see Ralph Crosby, head of EADS North America, seems to be under investigation as well.

[AerLingusA330]

Well, it's not like Airbus/EADS doesn't have its own issues to worry about.
Document Details Insider Trading Claims at Airbus

And I see Ralph Crosby, head of EADS North America, seems to be under investigation as well.

Airbus did have there problems but they have all been overcome, and are now in full production with A380, but the 787 hasnt even had power on yet, how long has it been since the 787 was rolled out?

[Bok269]

Airbus did have there problems but they have all been overcome, and are now in full production with A380, but the 787 hasnt even had power on yet, how long has it been since the 787 was rolled out?

And Boeing will overcome problems with the 787...

[666]

...and then Airbus will run into trouble with the A350 and first flight + delivery will be delayed and everybody will predict bankrupcy, and then Boeing will face a truckload of problems with their next baby and everyone will scream the company is going to the dogs because of the 797, and then the A390...

[Verbal]

Aerospace Notebook: Analyst questions Air Force tanker decision
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 05/28/2008
Author: James Wallace
(Copyright 2008 )

IT'S TIME FOR the Air Force to explain in far greater detail than it has why The Boeing Co. lost the tanker competition to the team of Northrop and EADS, a noted defense expert said Tuesday.

"Something is not quite right here," Loren Thompson, defense analyst with the private think tank the Lexington Institute, said in an interview.

In the past, Thompson has been widely criticized by Boeing supporters for being pro-Northrop on the tanker controversy.

But Thompson insisted he has only been reporting what Air Force sources have been telling him, and he had not taken sides in the dispute over whose tanker is better. Thompson said he's had three months since the tanker announcement to understand the issues and listen to all sides, and his latest report, which was posted on the Lexington Institute's Web site late Tuesday, represents the "conclusions I have come to."

The tanker-selection process was hardly as "transparent" as the Air Force has claimed, wrote Thompson, who has close contact with senior Air Force officers.

"Whatever else this process may have been, it definitely was not transparent," he wrote.

Boeing had been widely expected to win the Air Force competition with its 767 tanker, but instead the Air Force earlier this year picked Northrop and EADS, the European Aeronautic, Defense and Space Co., the parent of Airbus, to supply it with 179 tankers based on the far bigger and heavier Airbus A330.

Boeing has filed a protest of the Air Force decision with the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress. The GAO has a mid-June deadline to decide the merits of Boeing's protest. It would be highly unusual for the protest to be upheld.

But Thompson said that even if the GAO finds that only small mistakes were made by the Air Force, given Boeing's contention that the competition was very close, such a finding might be enough for Boeing's supporters in Congress to force the Air Force to hold another tanker competition.

Boeing claims that the Air Force changed its tanker requirements to help the bigger Airbus plane win the competition. Boeing has argued that the competition was "seriously flawed."

But Northrop has mounted an aggressive public-relations campaign, issuing almost daily statements about why its tanker is better than Boeing's. And Northrop has sharply criticized Boeing for suggesting the competition was unfair.

Previously, Thompson said Air Force leaders believe Boeing "is willfully misstating the facts in a bid to obscure the inferior performance of the plane it proposed."

But in the interview Tuesday, Thompson said he has been waiting for the Air Force to make a "slam-dunk" case to him about why Northrop and EADS won. But The Air Force has not been able to make such a case, he said.

"I never really got what I would consider an analytical explanation for the outcome, so what do we really know about what happened?" he said. "It just doesn't look good."

In his latest report, Thompson said the Air Force has failed to answer "even the most basic questions about how the decision was made."

"Whatever it finds," he wrote of the GAO review of Boeing's protest, "the Air Force has some explaining to do."

Thompson made the following points in his report and in the interview that he said raise serious questions about the Air Force decision:

The Air Force claims it would cost roughly the same to develop, manufacture and operate 179 tankers regardless of whether they are based on Boeing's 767 or the Airbus A330. But the Airbus plane is 27 percent heavier than Boeing's and burns a ton more fuel per flight hour, Thompson said. "With fuel prices headed for the upper stratosphere, how can both planes cost the same amount to build and operate over their lifetimes?"

The Air Force claims it would be equally risky to develop the Boeing and Airbus tanker. But the Airbus tankers will be built at plants in Alabama that do not yet exist, Thompson noted. Boeing's tanker would be built on its long-running 767 assembly line.

It doesn't make "common sense," Thompson said, that the Northrop-EADS tanker production plan would not have greater risk than Boeing's.

"This is not plausible," he said.

The Air Force has said the Northrop-EADS team received higher ratings on past performance than the Boeing team. But Thompson noted that Boeing has built all 600 of the tankers in the Air Force fleet, and Northrop and EADS have never delivered a single tanker equipped with the refueling boom the Air Force requires.

"How can Northrop and Airbus have superior performance?" Thompson said.

The Air Force has said a computer simulation of how the competing tankers would function in an actual wartime scenario strongly favored the larger Airbus plane. But the simulation assumed longer runways, stronger asphalt and more parking space than actually exist at forward bases, Thompson said, and the simulation failed to consider the consequences of losing bases in wartime.

"How can such unrealistic assumptions be relevant to the selection of a next-generation tanker?" Thompson said.

He also wrote in his report that the Air Force refused to consider Boeing cost data based on 10 million hours operating the commercial 767, and instead substituted repair cost on the 50-year-old KC-135 tanker. The Air Force also had said early on that it would not award extra points for exceeding key performance objectives, but then proceeded to award extra points, according to Thompson.

"Even now, neither of the competing teams really understands why the competition turned out the way it did," Thompson wrote. "It would be nice to hear from the Air Force about how key trade-offs were made, because at present it looks like a double standard prevailed in the evaluation of the planes offered by the two teams."

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[Vinco]

Forgive my ignorance but who is Loren Thompson and what is Lexington Institute?

[AerLingusA330]

.

How can Northrop and Airbus have superior performance?" Thompson said.

The Air Force has said a computer simulation of how the competing tankers would function in an actual wartime scenario strongly favored the larger Airbus plane. But the simulation assumed longer runways, stronger asphalt and more parking space than actually exist at forward bases, Thompson said, and the simulation failed to consider the consequences of losing bases in wartime.

right from the article, are these guys having a laugh or what:

• A330 is desgined for short field takeoffs and landings
• Has a far better fuel consumption over the 767 by a large margin
• for the last time on this, a330 is far more superior range, cargo capicaty

how can anyone say that the 767 is more superior performance than the 330

[Verbal]

A330 is desgined for short field takeoffs and landings

But you can't park it in as small a space as the 767. Some airfields may have adequate runways, but they can be severely space constrained.

how can anyone say that the 767 is more superior performance than the 330

As noted in the article, it burns a ton less fuel per flight hour than the A330.

[666]

Who cares about fuel burn per flight hour? What matters is the fuel burn per ton of payload.

[Bok269]

• A330 is desgined for short field takeoffs and landings

Source?

[seahawk]

I would not say short field take-offs, but the data supplied to the AF and which seems to be proven by the airliners every day is that, at max TO the A330 needs less runway, if only carrying the same payload as an 767 max payload it is considerably less.

I will look up the data at home, where I should have it in detail.

Yet there remains the unresolved change in what the USAF wanted when it came to parking space. They allowed the planes to be parked closer together, so that one mortar round could take out a whole lot of tankers. Imho this is a huge mistake and can prove disastrous in a real war.
On the other and the uSAF relies less and less on forward basing its aircraft and more and more on long range strike and deploying from the USAF to forward bases. On the refuelling track over typical distances in the Pacific region the KC-45 is clearly superior up to needing one aircraft less to deploy a whole fighter squadron including cargo and personal.

[Bok269]

I would not say short field take-offs, but the data supplied to the AF and which seems to be proven by the airliners every day is that, at max TO the A330 needs less runway, if only carrying the same payload as an 767 max payload it is considerably less.

I will look up the data at home, where I should have it in detail.

Yet there remains the unresolved change in what the USAF wanted when it came to parking space. They allowed the planes to be parked closer together, so that one mortar round could take out a whole lot of tankers. Imho this is a huge mistake and can prove disastrous in a real war.
On the other and the uSAF relies less and less on forward basing its aircraft and more and more on long range strike and deploying from the USAF to forward bases. On the refuelling track over typical distances in the Pacific region the KC-45 is clearly superior up to needing one aircraft less to deploy a whole fighter squadron including cargo and personal.

Thanks for that...I appreciate the actual information.