Next generation of tankers is in good hands

Toulouse France-based Airbus Industries originally withdrew from the competition to build America’s next generation of mid-air refueling tankers. While most Americans would like to see competitive bids for military contracts, we had hoped we were rid of this one.

The Airbus-vs.-Boeing tanker competition has been a long and troubled bidding process that has shed far more heat than light. Regrettably, it increasingly became a political struggle rather than a technological one.

The truth is that Airbus’s A330 would never have been a serious competitor were it not for political pressure from Capitol Hill forcing the Pentagon procurement team to give Airbus extra credit for nearly every difference its plan had compared to Boeings. The Airbus plane is larger, so the political pressure was to give them extra credit.

The problem with that was that the larger size of the Airbus tanker was a disadvantage in the real world, not an advantage. Its larger size meant it will not land on many of the runways our current tankers use. That would mean the larger plane was less available than the medium-sized Boeing tanker. A larger plane with more fuel will do our airmen no good whatsoever if it is not available exactly when and where combat pilots need it to be.

Alternatively, we could have upgraded the airfields to accommodate the larger, heavier Airbus tanker, but that would have cost a lot of taxpayer money. If this were a genuine price competition, those additional military construction costs should have been counted, and they weren’t to any significant degree, because of political pressure to shoehorn Airbus into the competition.

For these and other reasons, the American people should have been thankful that this particular competition should end with Airbus bowing out, allowing Boeing to build the new fleet. Boeing has six decades of experience building tankers for our military, and their fifth-generation boom is hopefully only a short time away from passing needed fuel to US and allied planes.

The Boeing 767 tanker, which Boeing refers to as its “NewGen” tanker will meet, or exceed all the requirements the Air Force procurement team asked for during the competition, and will do so at a lower cost than Airbus would have charged.