In the two weeks after the U.S. Air Force awarded its $40 billion aerial refueling tanker contract to the Northrop Grumman and EADS team — a decision that promised an aircraft assembly line at Mobile’s Brookley Field — Boeing and its congressional allies moved toward a formal protest, arguing the competition had been unfair.
That argument sat awkwardly alongside a long public record. For nearly two years, the same company and the same officials had been saying, repeatedly and on the record, that the competition was open, fair and transparent.
The record
Boeing’s vice president of tanker programs said in April 2007 that the company continued to have confidence the Air Force would run a fair and open competition. A day earlier he had gone further, expressing “extreme confidence” that the Air Force would continue a fair and open competition, praising the service for doing a great job, and saying he expected it to announce a winner so the program could move forward.
The same executive said Boeing had tailored its platform to the Air Force’s requirements rather than trying to tailor the requirements to its platform — a claim that would look different once the service concluded that the competing aircraft better met those requirements.
In December 2007, a Boeing spokesman said the Air Force had clearly communicated with the company throughout the summer and fall. In January 2008, a former Air Force chief of staff working as a Boeing consultant observed that if a protest were to come, it would have to rest on something everybody already knew — “because it is so transparent.”
Boeing’s supporters in Congress said much the same. A senator from Kansas commended the Air Force in October 2007 for conducting an open and fair competition, saying he had been nothing but impressed. Another Kansas senator said in February 2008 that it was “precisely because of the open nature of this competition” that he could confidently state Boeing had submitted a superior proposal. A senator from Washington state told an audience in October 2007 that she was proud the selection process had been “a truly open one.”
Then the winner was announced. On Feb. 29, 2008, a Washington congressman said he was very disappointed in the Air Force’s decision — while still allowing that he was sure the process had been fair and open.
Why it mattered on Mobile Bay
The point of assembling the record was not to score debating points. It was to shape the ground on which the coming protest would be fought.
Boeing had 10 days from its debriefing to file with the Government Accountability Office. Mobile’s civic and political leadership understood that the protest was not merely a procurement dispute but an existential threat to a project the region had spent years pursuing. Brookley Field had been the site of an Air Force base whose 1969 closure cost the city thousands of jobs; the tanker line was widely understood locally as a chance to undo that history.
The counterargument being assembled in Mobile was straightforward. A competition cannot be fair when you expect to win and rigged when you lose. If the process was as transparent as Boeing’s own executives had described, then the outcome deserved to stand.
What happened
Boeing filed its protest, and in June 2008 the GAO sustained it, finding significant errors in the Air Force’s evaluation — including in how the service assessed the aircraft’s ability to meet key requirements and how it calculated life-cycle costs. The award was pulled back and the competition restarted.
Boeing won the recompeted contract in 2011 and builds the KC-46 in Washington state. Mobile got its aircraft plant anyway, in a different form: Airbus opened a commercial A320 final assembly line at Brookley in 2015, on the same ground the tanker was supposed to occupy.
The record of who called the competition fair, and when, remains what it was.