Boeing slams KC-X procurement process

ST. LOUIS, March 11 (UPI) -- Boeing claimed Tuesday it made a better air tanker offer to the U.S. Air Force than EADS and Northrop Grumman.

The U.S. Air Force decided last month in its KC-X air tanker replacement program to buy the KC-45A air tanker made by Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautics Defence and Space Co. instead of Boeing's KC-767.

"The contract award and subsequent reports ignore the fact that in reality Boeing and the Northrop/EADS team were assigned identical ratings across all five evaluation factors: 1) Mission Capability, 2) Risk, 3) Past Performance, 4) Cost/Price and 5) Integrated Fleet Aerial Refueling Assessment," the company said in a statement. "Indeed, an objective review of the data as measured against the Request for Proposal shows that Boeing had the better offering in terms of Most Probable Life Cycle Costs, lower risk and better capability."

"Flaws in this procurement process resulted in a significant gap between the aircraft the Air Force originally set out to procure -- a medium-sized tanker to replace the KC-135, as stated in the RFP -- and the much larger Airbus A330-based tanker it ultimately selected," Boeing said.

"It is clear that frequent and often unstated changes during the course of the competition -- including manipulation of evaluation criteria and application of unstated and unsupported priorities among the key system requirements -- resulted in selection of an aircraft that was radically different from that sought by the Air Force and inferior to the Boeing 767 tanker offering," the company said.

"Because of the way the Air Force treated Boeing's cost/price data, the company was effectively denied its right to compete with a commercial-derivative product, contrary not only to the RFP but also to federal statute and regulation," the company said.

"The Air Force refused to accept Boeing's Federal Acquisition Regulation-compliant cost/price information, developed over 50 years of building commercial aircraft, and instead treated the company's airframe cost/price information as if it were a military-defense product," Boeing said.