By Emelie Rutherford
Boeing [BA] officially protested the Air Force’s decision to give a $35 billion-plus deal for aerial-refueling tankers to a rival last night, after angry lawmakers alleged Boeing underwent an unfair competition during which the service, among other things, failed to clarify its desired plane size.
Reps. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) called on Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley during a House Appropriations defense subcommittee (HAC-D) yesterday morning to re-compete the KC-45A tanker, which a Northrop Grumman [NOC]-European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co.– (EADS) team was tapped to build on Feb. 29.
“This is going to be a catastrophic fiasco that is going to hurt the reputation of the United States Air Force,” said Dicks, whose state and Tiahrt’s have Boeing manufacturing facilities.
Tiahrt said he was “misled by the United States Air Force,” because he said service officials previously said they needed to replace the KC-135E, a medium-sized tanker, and the service opted for a larger aircraft.
“It’s hard for me to understand how something as integral as the size of the aircraft was misconstrued in the award decision,” Tiahrt said. “This is just one of the many reasons why you will save time and money by deciding to recompete this with your real goal.”
Wynne maintained the Air Force “accurately followed the laws and arrived at the decision of selecting the better of two very qualified competitors to some published criteria.” He avoiding answering lawmakers’ questions in great detail, citing Boeing’s protest and a closed-door session with HAC-D members yesterday afternoon.
The size of the proposed aircraft was not one of the main deciding factors, Wynne said.
“In the request for proposal there was a whole series of KPPs and I think those are the overriding guidelines,” Wynne told reporters after the hearing.
Mark McGraw, vice president of Boeing Tanker Programs, told reporters yesterday the Chicago-based company decided to protest the tanker award for two reasons. One was that Boeing officials learned during a debriefing with Air Force acquisition officials last Friday that “this was an extremely close competition where the improper evaluation of just one or two factors could have resulted in a different decision,” and service officials noted “numerous strengths” to Boeing’s proposed aircraft, he said.
Also, McGraw said, Boeing determined there were “serious flaws” in the process of how its bid was evaluated. He said the company has issues with the Air Force allegedly: giving credit for capacities above stated objective requirements, improperly evaluating risk, inflating perceived risk of Boeing’s proposal, downplaying the risk of weaknesses in Northrop Grumman’s proposal, encouraging a stretched-out schedule and then treating that as negative, improperly evaluating cost/price data and changing the integrated fleet assessment model without incorporating real-world operational constraints.
“We continue to believe we offered the most capable aircraft, we believe we were the lower risk and we offered a lower price,” McGraw said in an afternoon conference call, before Boeing officially lodged the protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last night.
McGraw said Boeing was never given an indication from the Air Force during the evaluation period “that maybe we were not proposing the right-sized airplane.” Yet Boeing and its supporters on Capitol Hill continue to point to the Air Force’s perceived desire for a larger plane, as evidenced by its choice of Northrop Grumman-EADS’ greater sized craft.
“As we’ve gone through and kind of analyzed all the requirements and how we did versus our competitor based on the feedback [from Friday’s debriefing], we clearly feel in many many areas we were much better as far as the technical capability we were providing, and it was just discouraging to see in the end, it seemed to be about extra capacity that we still don’t understand why that’s needed in Air Force operations,” McGraw said.
Gen. Arthur Lichte, commander of Air Mobility Command, told reporters Feb. 29 the Northrop Grumman-EADS proposal offered more than Boeing’s did.
“More passengers, more cargo, more fuel to offload, more patients that we can carry, more availability, more flexibility and more dependability,” Lichte said.
Sue Payton, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, said the Northrop Grumman-EADS provided the best value when looking at five deciding factors: mission capability, proposal risk, past performance, cost/price and performance in a simulated war scenario.
In a statement yesterday, the Air Force said, “Proposals from all offerors were evaluated thoroughly in accordance with the criteria set forth in the request for proposals (RFP). The proposal from the winning offeror is the one the Air Force believes will best meet the best value criteria in the RFP and meet or exceed the requirements of the warfighter.” The service maintains it followed a transparent and fair process, noting there were hundreds of formal exchanges with offerors during the evaluation period.
“The Air Force provided all offerors with continuous feedback through discussions on the strengths and weaknesses of their proposals,” the service said.
Boeing would like the opportunity to try again for the tanker contract, said Bev Wyse, vice president of the Boeing 767 Airplane Program.
“Just based on … what the GAO and the Air Force eventually come back with, we’d like the opportunity, based on a fair process and clearly understanding what are their requirements, the opportunity to meet those requirements,” she said during yesterday’s conference call.
The GAO has 100 days from the date of the protest to issue its recommendation.