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Post by Deleted on Aug 22, 2008 23:55:42 GMT -5
Do you think Boeing had a better chance of winning the tanker bid if the B777 was entered as its proposal instead of the B767?
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Post by Adrian Wainer on Aug 23, 2008 5:30:40 GMT -5
Do you think Boeing had a better chance of winning the tanker bid if the B777 was entered as its proposal instead of the B767? Hi, it is a good question but, please correct me if I am wrong since I have not been keeping up to date on this issue, however if the state of play currently is that the choice is between a European offering and a Boeing offering, it would take me all of five minutes to make up my mind, and therefor I regard the technical details of the aircraft as largely ir-relevant. So I would suggest it is a good question but the wrong question. My reasoning being, that several European States have such a level of involvement with, and or, appeasement of, a number of communistic and fascistic political, cultural and religious movements and ideologies that they should be barred from supplying military equipment to the US with regard to purchases where the supplier might be able to cripple the supplied product by halting after sales support. I could give you several pages of materiel to support my claim there is such a problem with several European States but no doubt that would lay me open to accusations of being a racist, though in fact the bulk of the people who are responsible for this problem in Europe would be upper middle class to ultra wealthy and in high ranking positions in politics, government, academia, the media and commerce and white. Not exactly the sort of people one would expect to be abused and down-trodden as a result of racism. Quite a lot of people can not see the difference between the people in a country and it is culture and its government all three things are both inter-connected and separate and therefor if e.g. one can not criticize say the actions of the French Government without being accused of hating French people I do not see, how one could debate the issue you raise in any meaningful way. NB No, I am not making any criticism of the other posters here nor NB am I making any criticism of the Moderators of this forum, when I say the above, I am just making a reference to such attitudes of the general society that this forum and other places of communication operates in and as it is primarily for the discussion of airliners in the 1950s and it is operated as a free service to its members, I could not make any criticism of it, if it has fairly strict rules what could be discussed or not. I would draw your attention to: 3. This is a family rated forum - no coarse or vulgar language. No discussion of religion, politics, or other controversial topics (even in the slightest) is welcome in the Classic Discussion Forum, and will be moved to the Chat forum or be deleted upon the slightest complaint. You may post about such topics in the Chat forum, but it will be deleted if a complaint is received. Since I do not think the issue of the US tanker replacement contract can not be fairly debated without involving things such as e.g. Islam in today's World, European Government policies, the culture of various European States, Communism post the collapse of the USSR, post Third Reich Nazism etc I really am doubtful that the issue can be properly conducted within this forum. Best and Warm Regards Adrian Wainer |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 23, 2008 6:09:52 GMT -5
Ok
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Post by Tom/CalClassic on Aug 23, 2008 9:45:10 GMT -5
Hi,
I think the issue can be disscussed without *too* much politics.
The Airbus consortium won the contract (according to the Air Force) by providing a plane that had greater capabilities than did Boeing. Boeing then complained that the plane Airbus offered did not fit the original specifications given by the AF, which was true, and said that they would have offered the 777 instead of the 767 in that case. So the original bidding was thrown out and they will all have another try.
Keep in mind that the Airbus consortium includes many American companies, and at least as much of the plane would be built in the US as would Boeing's.
It was really the AF's fault for not knowing what they wanted in the first place.
Hope this helps,
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Post by Adrian Wainer on Aug 23, 2008 10:05:52 GMT -5
Hi, I think the issue can be disscussed without *too* much politics. Keep in mind that the Airbus consortium includes many American companies, and at least as much of the plane would be built in the US as would Boeing's. Hope this helps, Hi Tom, thanks for the short history on this as it went off my radar and it is difficult to see where the ball is if one has not been following the game for awhile, like I would agree with you that there will be a lot of US manufactured content in the Airbus proposal, that said there is now only one manufacturer of large passenger aircraft in the US and that is Boeing. It does not make sense that they are going to manufacture a virtually totally new aircraft for this contract or else they would have asked Boeing and its competitors to build a new aircraft, for sure there will be lots of US content in the aircraft but e.g. the flight control system software will no doubt be largely carried over from the civilian version, if that was to develop a fault and the US and some European states were disagreeing over a crisis situation, they might just say "fix it yourselves" and the USAF would be left with a fleet of grounded tankers. Best and Warm Regards Adrian Wainer |
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Post by Tom/CalClassic on Aug 23, 2008 21:09:15 GMT -5
Hi,
I highly doubt that they would do something like that, since it would alienate their current US airline customers too.
BTW, the planes would be built in the US (Mobile, AL) and would have only 35% foreign content (the Boeing bid is 30%). The prime contractor here would be Northrop.
Hope this helps,
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Post by capflyer on Aug 23, 2008 22:28:40 GMT -5
Actually, according to the USAF, the contract was not fully inked before the GAO protest was issued, so no work was actually authorized to be started. If EADS/NG wins the 4th round (which is what we're in) then the contract will be finalized and they'll be allowed to begin work.
Oddly enough, Boeing is on the other side of the same problem with the CSAR-X/HH-47 project. They won, but Lockheed & Sikorsky have successfully appealed the award twice and so they are waiting for round 3 to be decided because just as in the EADS/NG case, the "winner" offered an aircraft that far exceeded the goals which the USAF said it would not give extra consideration for and in one case (size) they would deduct for size in excess of the requirement, yet they still awarded the contract to the aircraft that was most grossly oversized to the original requirement, so Boeing knows what it feels like to be where EADS/NG is and they're wanting to ensure that their protest is handled just as fairly as it's being done in the CSAR-X competition.
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Post by Adrian Wainer on Aug 24, 2008 6:54:26 GMT -5
Hi, I highly doubt that they would do something like that, since it would alienate their current US airline customers too. Hope this helps, Well Tom, I just could not agree with you on that, and to give you an idea of where I am coming from, Saddam Hussein was looking to build an nuclear facility in Iraq and approached the Russians. The USSR authorities were happy to provide him with a regular nuclear power plant but the deal fell through because what the Iraqis wanted was an atomic bomb factory, which the Soviets would not sell him. So he went to the French Government and they happily did. An atomic bomb even a relatively small one such as e.g. was used at Hiroshima is a hugely powerful weapon and to cause the destruction which even one small atomic weapon can create but using conventional delivery systems and chemical high explosive calls for a massive armada of equipment and an equally large infrastructure. If one takes a nominal figure of 10,000 Metric Tons for a small atomic weapon, and say a a figure of 27 Metric Tons for the payload of a B-52 bomber, in a single small atomic bomb one is talking about the equivalent of a raid by 370 B-52 bombers. No there is no way a state like Iraq which is essentially a Third world country could have maintained a fleet of 370 B-52 bombers and if they could, it would have been no great effort for the USAF to shoot them down and even if a couple got though, it would be no way near the effect of a massed raid by 370 planes. Furthermore, when most people think of atomic weapons they think of some folks putting putting it on à missile and firing it off at other folks they do not like, but there is absolutely no necessity to do that, since all it would be necessary to do would be to pack it in a forty foot container deliver it under the guise of legitimate cargo to the USA, store it in a lockup warehouse in New York and detonate it. Now one might argue that, it is one thing to produce the fissile materiel which the atomic facility sold to Saddam Hussein could produce, it is quite another thing to build an atomic bomb. And it is true they are separate processes, but there is no great effort involved to build an atomic bomb once one has the fissile materiel and it would be certainly easy for a state like Saddam Hussein's Iraq to build as many nuclear weapons as he could obtain fissile materiel for. Now France has a large military and secret service and there must have been several people at the highest levels in such organizations who would have known precisely the risks involved in providing Saddam Hussein in the guise of the so called Osirak research reactor, with what was essentially a turn key, nuclear weapons production facility. Now Tom I do not argue that if Airbus was to withdraw support for a product it had sold the US Air force it might not upset US airlines, but I think the US airlines [ amongst other parties ] might have been a little more upset if several blocks of prime real state in Manhattan had got blasted by an Iraqi 10 kilo tonne nuclear weapon in the run up to Christmas and several tens of thousands of people had died and amongst them several of the wives and relatives of the CEOs of those same airlines you are talking about. So its seems illogical to me, that the same folks who did not seem to care they were risking nukeing New York, would lie awake at night because they had withdrawn support for an Airbus product sold to the US Air force and that in turn might upset US Airlines. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasakien.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-52_Stratofortressen.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManhattanBest and Warm Regards Adrian Wainer |
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