quickly covers mouth as not to spew orange chicken and rice all over monitor
Mmnnhpphh!! XD
Captain Amazing raises one relevant question - taxpayer expense - so I’ll raise the other issue: Which plane provides the Air Force with the best tool for the job?
I have little knowledge of how contract negotiations on that level are supposed to work and couldn’t compare the pros and cons of aerial tankers if my life depended on it. Still, the process should bloody well focus on getting the best tools in the hands of the troops within the budget available, rather than on acting as a job creation program.
Thanks, I didn’t realize they sold Rocketdyne to Pratt & Whitney in 2005. :smack: I should have, considering that all my academic adviser talked about was how they used to do things at P&W.
My point was that Boeing had a huge part in the International Space Station, and I know several engineers who are working for Boeing on satellites and satellite accessories, if you will. Other companies may compete with Boeing planes, but they’re not going to stop getting government contracts in the foreseeable future.
I believe the Air Force said Boeing’s plane didn’t meet any of the five criteria it set for the project.
I was given to understand that the Airbus planes actually cost more, and the Air Force still chose them because of the superiority.
I don’t think you have cites for any of these claims. What’s up?
You’ll see an analyst here says the Air Force chose EADS in spite of higher costs:
Here is one article mentioning the criteria: “The Air Force said its selection was based on five criteria: mission capability, proposal risk, cost and price, past performance and aircraft design characteristics such as tanker fuel capacity, takeoff performance and fuel consumption.”
From earlier in the same story: “Lichte said the aircraft, based on the Airbus 330-200 commercial passenger airliner, was twice the size of the Boeing aircraft, providing more tanker capacity, more passenger space if converted to air transport, and more space for patients if converted to the aero-evacuation mission.”
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/353250_tanker01.html
So perhaps Boeing won on cost and lost the other four. I saw other articles that said EADS won on four criteria, but I hope this is enough of a cite.
If Airbus does become more price competitive due to subsidies, wouldn’t that mean that European taxpayers are subsidizing the US military in turn?
Your cited analyst is a mercenary. What’s your stake here?
Just to be explicit, a weak dollar is good for US manufacturers. In the civilian aircraft market, Airbus is struggling because of the strong Euro. As it happens, their parent company made a loss last year. I was surprised that Airbus could pull this latest deal together.
Since it has only been alluded to here, I’ll note that Airbus/Northrup will be doing part of their work in Alabama and Mississippi. Cite.
I’m with SenorBeef: as a taxpayer, I’m happy to have the Europeans give us a discount on our military aircraft, if that is what they indeed are doing.
Surely if the dollar has collapsed, that makes it much harder for a european company to compete?
Every analyst who gets paid is a “mercenary.” Your choice of descriptive words doesn’t change the facts that the analyst reported: there were five criteria, and Airbus lost on four of them. If you can find another analyst – mercenary, volunteer, or other – who reports different facts, bring it on.
I can understand you’re upset, but unless the requirements in the RFP were changed without Boeing being allowed to revise their proposal, they lost fair and square. The conventional wisdom in the D.C. acquisition community is that Boeing was betting on protectionism to keep their aging (obsolete?) 767 production lines open for a few more years. Boeing didn’t understand how absolutely toxic their brand name has become within USAF acquisitions – I was on a program with a Boeing component that had been selected during the Druyun days, and everyone knew that (a) the wrong team won the job, and (b) the Boeing product would be delivered late, over budget, and broken*. If they were going to get this contract, they needed to at least win the main performance category and two of the other five.
The number of jobs lost in this contract is substantial, but the job market shrunk by 63,000 jobs in February exclusive of the Boeing deal. If America is going to divert money from its best uses** in order to save jobs, a once-in-four-decades manufacturing contract isn’t the right place to do it. We’ve got bigger problems.
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- The first prototype was supposed to be delivered in early 2007, and it had already gone 20% over budget in 2006. I’ll let you know whether it’s broken when/if it arrives.
** - per ECON 101, the ones with most marginal utility, i.e. buying the best bang-per-buck platforms
- The first prototype was supposed to be delivered in early 2007, and it had already gone 20% over budget in 2006. I’ll let you know whether it’s broken when/if it arrives.
This is the worst possible criterion. I don’t think this should be a factor at all, although unfortunately I realize that this is not politically feasible.
There may be legitimate reasons to keep parts of military contracts within the United States (securing technology secrets, etc) and I do not know enough about the military to speak of them. But deciding on the company based on the number of US jobs compared to foreign jobs is ridiculous. It basically means that all other factors being equal you are prepared to take the inferior or more expensive product, supporting the company shown to be less competitive. Not exactly a recipe for technological innovation or keeping costs down. If the US job providing companies do not win bids the solution is for them to say “oh, fuck, we better shape up”, not to game the system by relying on nationalism.
And just because it is the pit, Lou Dobbs is the biggest fucking waste of space known to man. I hope he ends up living out of a dumpster while someone on a Bangalore satellite feed presents his show.
Personally, I’m tired of the military, after taking it’s time and evaluating all the data saying ‘this is what we need to get the job done’, being over-ruled by the politicos and being forced to buy an inferior product.
From the New York Times
Also the ‘save our jobs’ is apparently BS as well.
Boeing assumed the contract was theirs from the start. They lost. Suck up and deal.
I’m generally suspicious of Airbus as a rule, because as ham-fisted and erratic as Boeing is, I’ve real doubts about Airbus’s ability to meet requirements for anything. But such is life. Their crappy new behemoth jet may one day make a profit, but probably not a sufficient one for the level of investment time and cash, while Boeing’s Dreamliner has apparently already done itself a turn. Wouldn’t that be ironic, though, if true? Boeing wins the apssenger market by giving it what it wants while Airbus tries to ram through unneeded goods, then Airbus wins this contract while reversing the grounds? Heh.
Yep. This is what people who complain about foreigners subsidizing their industry don’t get. Oh, the horror! The people of Europe are using their tax money to give Americans cheap airplanes! Someone stop them before they subsidize us again!
That bit of snark aside, I’m a staunch free trader, but one area in which I think there is a role for nationalism is in the military industy. There is a certain amount of danger in outsourcing your weapons and high-technology defense appropriations. If Boeing loses a bunch of engineers to Airbus, that’s a strategic loss for the U.S. So when choosing contracts between an American military supplier and a foreign one, the American supplier should get a little extra weighting.
The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein says it’s more complicated: (link may require registration, but is free)
That looks like the original specs weren’t so much “later changed to favor a larger aircraft” as they were “originally written to exclude a larger aircraft so as to ensure a Boeing victory,” which is quite a different spin on things.
Sailboat
I was in a meeting this morning where I heard that a number of FY09 budget proposals are being shelved or flushed because FY07 and FY08 have a record number of “protests” which are eating up existing budgets. A protest, in the acquisition world, is where the loser makes everyone sit on their thumbs while a higher authority reviews their complaint to make sure things were really really fair. Meanwhile the program slips its Congressional budget and schedule deadlines, and the winning company gets put in a bind.
I also heard that a few program managers are starting to build a year of schedule slack into their competitive programs up front, and to attach four or five “nice to have” features that can be dropped immediately, in order to account for a year-long protest from the loser.
Suck it up whiners – or next time you’ll be the winner and bitching about the loser trying to screw you over, and I will have zero sympathy.
I have no “stake.” I read a couple of articles about this story and felt I could answer a question. Which I did. Mind if I ask what your problem is? Does this affect you personally in some way? If so, I’m sorry, but that’s not my fault.
Asserting “you don’t have a cite” was arrogant enough and then some, and now you’re casting aspersions about my ethics. And based on what? The fact that I’d read up on something well enough to paraphrase one side of it? Sorry to have offended you so. But I’m thinking you should either put up by disproving anything I’ve said, or else shut the fuck up and apologize.
Having just completed the Defense Acquisition University’s 26 friggin hour course on how to buy major systems (from helicopters to aircraft carriers), I can state that during the contract competition phase the government is required from the outset to provide a list of all criterion that will be used to determine their selection and the relative weights of each. This information must be available from the beginning, and I do not believe they are allowed to modify it. The government can say things like, “We probably don’t want a larger aircraft,” but it doesn’t mean anything to final selection unless it is in the selection criteria.
Those criteria should be available for review, so it should be a relatively simple matter of determining who met which ones better, and how much they were worth. This process is in place specifically to avoid problems like this.
Surely if I’d actually said that, you might have a point?
Yes.
You know what? I’m sorry too. You didn’t deserve that and I wish I could take it back. My intent was to figure out whether you had some personal investment, in which case I wouldn’t pursue this conversation. Since early January I’ve been chasing this story and right now I’m holding onto it like a pitbull. My feelings are just a bit too hot. I sincerely and unreservedly apologize, Marley.