I guess because in every competition where both Boeing and NGrumman bid, Boeing’s plane won.
Oh wait, the NG plane won EVERY competition, including the one here in the United States.
Boeing has only won twice. Once when they were sole-sourced and bribed the procurement official with a job, and the other when they sued and cajoled the government into re-writing the RFP to give the award to a plane with their smaller airframe.
I guess all of our allies could just be dolts. As could the fine people in our own military who determined, against political arguments, that EADS/NG was a better bid than the “all-american” Boeing bid.
I certainly don’t know which bid would have been better, or which of the previous bid was really better, I can only judge based on results, and the results clearly suggest EADS is better than Boeing —
That is, unless you absolutely need a tanker that can land at smaller airfields, and don’t care that you need to take off and land more often because you carry less fuel. Not like takeoff and landing is really dangerous in a war situation or anything.
Your post proves that point.
Why did the GAO, the Government Accounting Office decide that the last round was not fair to all parties?
You seem to have left out the fact that Airbus EADS provided a product that did NOT meet the specs, in the last go-round.
It was the GAO which made them start the entire process over.
BTW, “it takes fuel to carry fuel” -— so, after a certain level of capacity, you find that a large portion of the fuel that you must carry is devoted to the job of transporting more fuel.
The Boeing Tanker can be based in more places, since it does not need as much run way, and does not need as much in the way of hangars and storage space.
The EADS tanker could not be based in as many places, so it would have to waste fuel to carry fuel as it would often be forced to travel a longer distance, on its mission.