OT: Boeing Loses Out on Air Force Tanker Deal

a fair comment. but we will have to monitor ANYONE who builds ANYTHING for us. it's the way of the wolrd.

it isn't just that. ok buy the best...and support it. but i despair for the fact that this seems to be a me generation government. all people seem to care about is getting theirs and son't give a f*ck about who they step on or hurt. some damn good people in the military....most of them who wouldn't touch a real elected post with a 100 foot pole. this whole damn society seems egocentric and oblivious to the world. i don't wonder at all why so many hate us.

i think most of what you say is correct, but the warming thing..where did you see any reversal? that major ice field crumbling in a less than a month is scary. too many respectable scientists seem to be finding too much to support the idea. and let's think about the oil addiction and how shirt that fuse is. ain't never gonna see cheap, or even middlin affordable gas again. that is a real killer for fixed income people. drive cross country for fun? not me, baby.

What I blame is the fact that there is only one commercial aircraft manufacturer left in the USA - and that is the only and real reason that Boeing is the only choice. The reasons behind that are the reasons that America has become de-industrialized...fix those, and we'll get more domestic choices.

Airframe produced in Everett - Tanker conversion done in Wichita...

Jack G.

Guy who went to jail was Mike Sears - came to Boeing with the McDonnell acquisition, one of Stonecipher's boys...

Jack G.

Yea, maybe the real looser will be Minicraft who probably had a 1:144 767 tanker all tooled up...

Jack G.

All I know is that Boeing will probably take it out on the kit industry. :(

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Woman who went to jail was Darleen Druyun, retired no.2 USAF acquisition exec.

on 2/29/2008 8:21 PM snipped-for-privacy@some.domain said the following:

Hey! I need that rebate check to help replace the $1800 I've already paid for 4 months of fuel oil this winter.

on 2/29/2008 7:22 PM snipped-for-privacy@some.domain said the following:

September 8, 1944.

This week President Roosevelt ordered the Army to seize a small Minneapolis brassworks because the C.I.O. workers had called a "work stoppage," labor's wartime euphemism for a strike.

This was the 21st time in the war that the President had been forced to seize a war-essential plant because of labor trouble. Strikes breaking out again in the coal fields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia seemed about to swell the list : with 33 mines already being operated by the Government, new walkouts last week left 30 mines and 12,000 miners idle and ?presumably ? waiting for the Army to come in.

The union-authorized coal strikes were the most serious. In general the U.S. merely went on suffering from its apparently chronic rash of brief wildcat walkouts. At the huge Willow Run Liberator bomber plant, 2,000 key workers walked out one day, walked back in the next; they had entirely stalled production for more than 24 hours. In Chicago 600 employes at the Dodge plant, which makes 6-29 Superfortress engines, struck for three days, scurried back to work after a wounded Army private had pleaded with them. In Bessemer, Ala., male welders in the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Co. went on strike when the female welders got a raise. This was a full week's strike crop.

These flash strikes were almost never individually serious, but their cumulative total was. If walkouts continue at the present rate, labor will hang up a new record in 1944 of 5,200 strikes in one year. (During the six-year period between 1927 and 1932, inclusive, the total number of strikes was 4,520, but only one-third the number of people working now were employed then.) This means that work stoppages, despite labor's no-strike pledge for the duration, are occurring more frequently now than at any time during the past 25 years.

"> What I blame is the fact that there is only one commercial aircraft

This is really the root of the the problem - we once had multiple companies building passenger size jets - Boeing, Lockheed and Douglas, and were actually flying two different tankers - KC-135 Boeing, and KC-10 Douglas. Then in the 80s and 90s, the Dept of Defense decided they could not afford the competition and support of multiple suppliers. So the era of mergers and plant shut downs were upon us. Larger bought smaller, and equal sizes merged, As as they merged facilities were kept at one site and closed at others. Grumman had 36,000 employees at two major sites on Long Island, today the Calverton facility is closed, a utility water tower stands in the middle of what was the Bethpage runway, and we have about 2,200 employees. The merged Northrop Grumman still builds aircraft - but now longer on Long Island. But now the only way to get competition on really large contracts is to go with foreign companies providing significant portions of the contract. We've also hobbled much of our industry with overly entheusiatic green laws that drove costs up and major pushes by the Dept of Defense to get the cost down by whatever method possible. Some years back companies started out sourcing things like aircraft electrical cables to places like Mexico where the cost was 1/15 - that right 1/15 of doing them in America. DoD wanted cheaper F-14s or they'd close the line and our laws were driving the price up.

Val Kraut

And in relation to that:

Actually, that's only part of it - what was really at the root of all the mergers wasn't the USAF deciding anything about cost, but the industry adopting the business practices of Demming and the Japanese auto makers in an attempt to maximize productivity and profit in the face of rising labor costs. And all this was done without regard to differences in culture between the US and Japan, which I think is critical. All the things we did well were simply thrown out with the bathwater in the name of "efficiency".

That, and the fact that companies became ripe for the picking in the face of contracts simply not being there to compete for in the first place...

...and there are ways to get big contract without resorting to foreign companies - it's called exporting. Just look at global sales of the F-16, F-15, F/A-18, and jetliners. Yes, it's tricky, but it's done. Very successfully.

The USAF ain't clean in this deal...I smell another rat...

"> ...and there are ways to get big contract without resorting to foreign

Even there we shot ourselves in the foot. We were eager to get the cost of weapons systems down by exporting to other companies. In some cases though the other countries like Japan wanted part of the buy to be home built - we went and exported industrial knowhow and techniques that were unique and we handed them away to get the total buy up. Then these same things came back to be used against us in competative situations. We complain about Red China being able to destroy a satellite in a test of a anti satellite weapon - but forget that the orbital rendezvous techniques required were given to China during the Clinton Administration so they could do multiple satellite launches on one booster for Iridium. Then we find out about Chinese donations to the Clinton campaign.

Val Kraut

mea culpa - I meant Northrop Grumman but wrote Lockmart.

What the f**k is Lockmart?

"EADS is building a new assembly plant in Mobile Alabama, and a plant to do the refueling stuff in West Virginia, plus the work at NGC St Augustine - and an estimated 25,000 other jobs in the US making subsystems. EADS is also talking about assembling commercail Freighter varients in Mobile. We're not just sending the money to France - but we will now have another facility in the US. Maybe back to the good old days of competition for military contracts.

Val Kraut