Air Tankers
There's some good coverage of the growing air tanker scandal over on Aero News. It seems that Boeing rewrote the requirements, with the complicity of certain officers, to assure themselves a win on the tanker bid. In fact, Boeing was unable to accomodate 19 of the 26 requirements, so they had them eliminated from the RFP. Airbus (that evil French company) met 20 of the original 26 requirements.
The only reason that we know about this is that Boeing made the mistake of hiring former Assistant Undersecretary Darleen Druyun too fast, making her a vice president. That got people curious, and they discovered the following email during the investigation:
Boeing's man in charge of the tanker deal, Bob Gower, wrote in an email during the five month rewrite, "Meeting today on price was very good. Darleen (Druyun, then still an Air Force official) spent most of the time bringing the USAF price up to our number. ... It was a good day. She may be running her own covert operation on this one, so we probably don't want to discuss openly."
Isn't that interesting?
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Ross
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Actually, you're only making
Actually, you're only making it seem half as bad as it actually is. Under the deal that Boeing "negotiated," the Air Force will be leasing the new tankers, rather than buying them. As I myself have discovered, leasing is more expensive than buying. However, the added expense here is several orders of magnitude greater than on my Lexus.