Refueling Tanker Decision Tabled

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to hold off the choice of a new Air Force refueling tanker plane over to the next administration.

It is a decision that could benefit Boeing and Pratt & Whitney.

Rep. Joseph D. Courtney, D-2nd District, said he received word of Gates’ decision last week from Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, who chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Air and Land Forces. And he said it is exactly the cooling off period that the tanker process needs, giving more time for the Boeing-Pratt & Whitney team to resubmit its bid.

“I had written to Secretary Gates and asked him to do exactly this,” Courtney said. “This has been mishandled so badly by the administration that rushing into a new contract would be a no-win situation,” he said.

“This plane will be with us for decades,” Courtney said, adding it should be approached with all due deliberation.

Clean Slate

“This gives a clean slate for the next administration,” he said.

Chicago-based Boeing last month warned the Pentagon that it needs six months to come up with a new refueling tanker plane bid, not the two months that the Defense Department had proposed.

Boeing got a second shot at the $35 billion aircraft contract in August when the General Accountability Office found that the original contract process was flawed. The GAO concluded that the bidding process had been skewed in favor of Boeing’s competitor, a team including the military arm of Europe’s Airbus Industrie and California-based Northrop Grumman.

The Airbus team would use engines made by Fairfield-based General Electric at its plants in Massachusetts and Ohio.

The GAO agreed with Boeing’s protest against the original contract award to Airbus in part on the grounds that the Pentagon changed its mind about the size of the plane it wanted after the request for proposals was issued.

And that change favored the larger plane offered by Airbus, based on its A330 commercial aircraft, the GAO said.

Boeing’s entry is based on its 767 commercial aircraft.

Deadline Postponed

Although the Boeing plane would carry a smaller fuel load than the Airbus offering, Boeing partisans have said that because of its smaller size the Boeing plane would be more useful because it could land at more military bases around the world and would burn less fuel than the Airbus plane.

The Boeing plane utilizes engines made by East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney.

But when the Pentagon last month notified the competitors that there would be a second round of bidding, Defense Department officials also said they wanted the new bids by the end of October, permitting the Pentagon to award the final contract by Dec. 31.

That’s about six months faster than the original bidding and review process took.

That initial process ended when the Government Accountability Office ruled that the original bidding procedures were flawed, overturning the original contract award.