Pet Forum

The General Accounting Office (GAO) may cost Northrop the $35 billion contract to build a new tanker for the US Air Force. Siding with Boeing's challenge to awarding the new tanker contract to Northrop Grumman, the GAO found that the decision by the Air Force to give the new tanker project to Northrop may have been skewed. This defense contract was hotly contested, and both Boeing and Northrop were in a near dead heat until the end. While the GAO's decision is not binding on the Air Force, their decision is almost always followed since a failure to comply would be reported to Congress for further investigation. The winner of the KC-X tanker contact will be creating nearly 44,000 new jobs throughout the United States.

The winner of this Air Force contract will determine the replacement for the KC-135 refeuling tanker. The Boeing tanker version has been named the KC-767, and the Northrop tanker version is the KC-30.

The GAO tanker report cited the following errors by the Air Force in the tanker contract process:

1- The Air Force did not assess the relative merits of the proposals in accordance with the evaluation criteria identified in the solicitation, which provided for a relative order of importance for the various technical requirements.

2- The Air Force conducted "misleading and unequal discussions" with Boeing by informing the company that it had fully satisfied a key performance parameter objective, but later determined that Boeing had only partially met the objective, without advising Boeing of the change in the agency's assessment

3- The Air Force's evaluation of military construction costs in calculating the (two companies) most probable life-cycle costs for their proposed aircraft was unreasonable.