Time for Your Weekly Tanker Saga Update

First, lets start with my analysis. As soon as Airbus proposed the A330, Boeing knew that they were facing a larger, more modern, and more capable plane.

They stuck with the 767 for a very simply reason, they believed that they were God's gift to tankers, and commercial clients still wanted to buy the 777, so they thought that it was more convenient.

First, Boeing has filed a formal protest on the award, which is as surprising as the sun coming up in the morning. (See here, here, and here.)

Needless to say, Democrats are using this to take shots against John Mccain (Read a fantastically funny riff on the politics here)

Truth be told, the first deal to lease was corrupt, with DoD and Boeing officials going to jail over the deal, and. McCain was right to challenge the deal.

A lot of the problem for Boeing is that they were unbelievably arrogant and unresponsive to the DoD:

“The Boeing team was not responsive and often was not even polite,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., based on conversations he said he had with defense officials. “Somehow that all eluded senior management,” Mr. Thompson said. “They were not even aware there was a problem.”

Add to this that Boeing's record in defense contracting is worse than that of Northrop Grumman in terms of being on time and on budget, and that they had an inferior product, and this was a done deal.

Boeing was hoping to rest on its laurels, and the fact that much of the Congress would flip out over the choice.

Of course it doesn't help that McCain campaign staffers lobbied for EADS.

Additionally, one of Boeings arguments, that EADS was ill equipped to create a working boom (boom and probe primarily used by the USAF, and products developed for the USAF, everyone else uses hose and drogue), was not accurate. They were already developing a boom for Australia (I guess for their F-111s, the F-18s use hose and drogue).

Furthermore, EADS was motivated to move work to the us, because they wanted to take advantage of the cheap dollar. That's a reason that all the A330 freighter assembly will be moving to the US. It's cheaper for them now.

For what it's worth, The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) has issued a statement supporting the deal, so it met their snif test.

Boeing has now released the specifics of its complaint against the process:

• That the formula used to rate the competitors was changed at the last minute.
• That this changed favored EADS by making range and payload more important, and ramp space requirements less so.
• That they failed to give Boeing credit for its commercial airliner experience.

My comment on the last point is that the DoD took a look at your contracting performance with them and decided that you sucked.