Hey, this might work. Velma Jackson asked the Mobile City Council to start a weekly prayer meeting in order to entice the Tanker God's to award the upcoming USAF Tanker contract to the team of Northrop Grumman and EADS-Airbus. Mobile City is the proposed site for the assembly of Airbus A330F aircraft that the NGS/EADS team will be bidding to the USAF. The region stands to get lots of Job's if the contract were won by NGS/EADS, along the order of thousands or so they say. There will be jobs to be sure but I don't see the numbers they are claiming as it defies logic that Airbus will transfer this assembly line to the US killing jobs in the various countries in Europe that build it now. I mean, they get direct grants of money by their partner governments that fund the building of these aircraft for precisely that reason, the Jobs. The reality is that the aircraft will be fully assembled in France and then flown to this new facility where all the military equipment and the actual Tanker package will be installed.
Meanwhile, in other news the government of India has announced it will not be buying any of the Airbus A330/KC-30 Tanker aircraft for its Air Force. This leaves Airbus with only the launch customer of Australia (4 aircraft), the UAE (3 aircraft), Saudi Arabia (3 aircraft) and the UK (14 aircraft) that they will be building aircraft for unless they prevail in the USAF contract.
Also for your digestion, the USAF announced that the Final version of the Tanker Replacement RFP will be released soon either at the end of this month (January) or in early February, and they are making changes from what was in the Draft. Both potential bidders for this large contract were enumerate with the draft RFP although the changes being made are described as minor in nature so it is not known how the NGS/EADS-Airbus Team will stay in the bidding process. We have to wait till the Final RFP is out and they have a chance to review it.
Still more fun than you can shake a flying boom at!!
BT: Jimmy T sends
2 comments:
Tanker Gods. Heh. Now they gotta make a decision as to which deity has purview and which one they should direct their prayers to, no? We can assume the Catholics and various protestant denominations can be rolled up into One Entity... but what if Allah got this one? Or the Buddha? And then there are all those various Hindu deities to consider... any one of which might have been delegated to handle this decision...
OK.. you can slap me now. I deserve it. ;-)
Buck, good for a laugh!!
BT: Jimmy T sends.
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