Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Tanker Wars/KC-X Winner - Airbus?

In todays Tanker Wars update we have this breaking news - Airbus is the apparent winner of at least the technical side of the competition. Here is the Story. The upshot here is that Airbus scored many points on the larger size aircraft they proposed than Boeing did with their KC-767 Next Gen tanker proposal.

The competition now goes down to cost and my thoughts are that Boeing doesn't stand a chance. Despite the A330 being a much larger aircraft to build and correspondingly higher costs to build, Airbus will still out bid Boeing. Remember folks, Airbus is NOT in this competition to build aircraft or to make a profit, the partner governments which fund Airbus simply want to keep people working building aircraft in Europe. Even though Airbus claims they will spend huge money building a "post" production facility in the USA, it will only be a token effort in the end because they really only want to keep europeans employed with this effort.

Boeing on the other hand has to make a profit and they can not compete against a business model that does not.

Plain and simply, our air borne war fighters will be taking gas from an aircraft built by socialists!!

Its really too bad that the US defense industrial complex could not defend itself from a hostile takeover of this magnatude. What next, will the next Air Force 1 be an Airbus?

BT: Jimmy T sends.

1 comment:

Buck said...

NOT good news. At all.