The Air Force is moving forward with its Three Dimensional Long Range Radar (3DELRR) corrective action plan as it awaits formal notice from the Justice Department of Raytheon’s [RTN] appeal.
“As of (Wednesday) morning, the Justice Department has not received notification that an appeal has been filed with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit,” Air Force spokesman Justin Oakes said Wednesday in an email.
Oakes said Raytheon filed two motions with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims: the first motion was for an emergency stay on the court’s May 11 decision. The second motion was for an injunction pending appeal in an effort to stop the Air Force from taking corrective action. U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Margaret Sweeney on May 15 declined to issue an emergency injunction pending the resolution of Raytheon’s motion and set an expedited briefing schedule.
Oakes did not respond to a request for comment as to what the Air Force was specifically moving forward with in its corrective action plan.
Raytheon lawyer Mark Colley of the law firm Arnold & Porter filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims on May 14, notifying the court that it was appealing Sweeney’s decision to dismiss the company’s lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for Federal Claims, via the federal government’s PACER online court record repository, shows that an appeal, received May 15, was docketed May 18.
Raytheon sued the Air Force earlier this year to prevent it from taking corrective action, or reopening the 3DELRR program to competition. Raytheon late last year beat out Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] for the 3DELRR contract, which is speculated to be worth more than $1 billion with all options exercised.
After Raytheon won the 3DELRR contract, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which lost out, filed bid protests with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Northrop Grumman argued in a May 7 redacted court filing that the Air Force’s 3DELRR procurement was fundamentally flawed in several ways. One was that the service gave offerors materially different instructions regarding how the agency would evaluate and score their proposals.
Northrop Grumman said in its May 7 filing that GAO indicated, in a non-binding outcome prediction session, that it was likely to sustain the protests. The Air Force then decided to reopen discussions with all three offerors and evaluate new technical and cost/price proposals, prompting Raytheon’s lawsuit.
3DELRR is designed to detect and track hostile aircraft or missions at long range and is to replace the AN/TPS-75 air defense radar originally supplied by Northrop Grumman (Defense Daily, Jan. 21).