In the last days of February 2008, Mobile was waiting on a decision that would be made in Washington but felt entirely local. The U.S. Air Force was preparing to award a contract, valued at roughly $40 billion, to build a new generation of aerial refueling tankers. If the team of Northrop Grumman and EADS won, the aircraft would be assembled at Brookley Field on Mobile Bay. If Boeing won, they would be built in Everett, Washington.
The waiting produced the kind of rumor traffic that only a high-stakes decision can generate.
A report from Malaysia
The Malaysia Sun, citing no sources whatsoever, reported that the EADS-Northrop Grumman partnership had won the contract. The claim could not be immediately confirmed in Mobile, and it was received locally with the appropriate mixture of hope and skepticism — a foreign wire aggregator with no visible reporting behind it was not the customary channel for Pentagon procurement news.
The episode captured the strangeness of the moment. A city of 200,000 people was refreshing obscure news websites, watching Boeing’s stock ticker and trading calls with anyone who might have a line into the Air Force, because the outcome would determine whether thousands of aerospace manufacturing jobs landed on a decommissioned air base on its waterfront.
The split-contract theory
Meanwhile, talk of dividing the contract between Boeing and the Airbus-affiliated team had gained strength, despite earlier and emphatic statements from military and congressional leaders that the competition would remain winner-take-all.
The idea had obvious political appeal. Splitting the award would give both Washington state and Alabama a share of the work and defuse a fight that had already consumed enormous congressional energy. It also had obvious practical problems: dividing the contract would likely require a virtual do-over of the request for proposals and delay delivery of aircraft the Air Force said it urgently needed, since the KC-135 fleet then in service dated to the Eisenhower administration.
What Mobile had at stake
Brookley Field had been a wound in Mobile’s civic memory since 1969, when the closure of Brookley Air Force Base cost the city thousands of jobs and, by some estimates, a tenth of its population. The prospect of an Airbus assembly line on the same runways was more than an economic development win; it was a restoration.
The politics were correspondingly fierce. Alabama’s congressional delegation, led by Sens. Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, had pressed the case relentlessly. Washington state’s delegation and organized labor pressed Boeing’s, arguing that a European-designed aircraft should not be built with American defense dollars. The fight had become a proxy for a larger argument about globalization, defense manufacturing and the meaning of “American-made.”
The answer arrives
The Air Force announced its decision on Feb. 29, 2008. The Northrop Grumman-EADS team won. Mobile celebrated at Brookley within hours.
The victory did not hold. Boeing filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office, which sustained it in June, finding significant errors in the Air Force’s evaluation. The competition was recompeted, and in 2011 Boeing won. The Mobile assembly line eventually came anyway — as a commercial Airbus A320 plant, opened in 2015 on the same Brookley ground, born of relationships forged during the tanker fight.
But in late February 2008, none of that was known. There was only a rumor from Malaysia, a stock ticker, and a city holding its breath.