Boeing meets deadline for tanker bids
Company boasted that its tanker would be more cost-effective to own and operate than the one offered by rival EADS North America.
Boeing Co. on Friday submitted its bid for the Air Force's aerial refueling tanker contract, offering a militarized version of its 767 commercial aircraft to replace the Eisenhower-era KC-135s now in the fleet.
Mindful of Friday's deadline for bids, Boeing officials hand-delivered the 8,000-page proposal to the tanker program office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the company said in a statement.
The bid satisfied all 372 requirements laid out by the Air Force in its request for proposals released earlier this year, the company said.
Boeing's rival EADS North America submitted its proposal for the competition Thursday. The firm, the U.S. arm of the European aerospace and defense consortium, is offering the larger Airbus A330 in pursuit of the contract, whose worth is estimated at as much as $40 billion.
"This revolutionary tanker will deliver wide-body capabilities in a narrow-body footprint, operate in any theater or from any base, and -- with the lowest operating cost of any tanker in the competition -- save the Air Force and the American taxpayers billions of dollars," Dennis Muilenburg, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space and Security, said in the statement.
Boeing boasted that its 767-based "NewGen" tanker would be more cost-effective to own and operate than the A330 and would save U.S. taxpayers more than $10 billion in fuel costs alone over its expected 40-year service life.
In its statement, Boeing also said its tanker would cost 15 percent to 20 percent less to maintain than the A330, for a savings estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
But EADS officials expressed confidence at a Washington news briefing Thursday that they could compete with Boeing on price -- a major criterion in the Air Force's bid evaluation.
"I feel good about the intersection of value and price," said Ralph Crosby, EADS North America chairman. "We played this game for one reason -- one single reason -- and that's to win."
The Air Force has been trying to replace its aging fleet of tankers for years, with this latest round marking its third attempt to replace the aging Boeing KC-135s.
In 2003, the Air Force tried to lease Boeing KC-767s before reviewing other options, but the $23.5 billion deal collapsed under pressure from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who helped expose Air Force corruption behind the lease. That resulted in jail terms for two senior Boeing officials -- one of whom had been a high-ranking Air Force procurement official involved in developing the leasing plan -- and forced the service to open future tanker contracts to competition.
The first competition to sell tankers to the Air Force resulted in the selection in early 2008 of the A330 model over the 767. But Boeing successfully protested the contract to GAO and the Pentagon canceled it, forcing a new solicitation of bids that ends Friday.