When a Eu­ro­pean com­pa­ny of­fered a larg­er tanker than Boe­ing for a low­er price in 2008, the Air Force grabbed what seemed like a bar­gain. But avi­a­tion an­a­lysts say Boe­ing won a re­match this week be­cause the gov­ern­ment's pref­er­ence had shift­ed to a plane with few­er bells and whis­tles but one that could be much cheap­er to op­er­ate in the next few decades. The changes in the bid­ding rules for one of the Pen­ta­gon's rich­est con­tracts were rel­a­tive­ly sub­tle, mak­ing the $35 bil­lion award to Boe­ing on Thurs­day a sur­prise for the com­pa­ny's ex­ec­u­tives.

In the end, the pro­posed size of the aer­i­al fu­el­ing plane of­fered by Boe­ing's ri­val, the Eu­ro­pean Aero­nau­tic De­fense and Space Com­pa­ny, or EADS, seemed to work against it. And Boe­ing may have won, sev­er­al an­a­lysts said, be­cause its jet could save bil­lions of dol­lars more in fly­ing costs than any dis­counts EADS might have of­fered on its stick­er price. Un­der the change, the Air Force agreed to project the cost of the fu­el used to pow­er the tankers over a 40-year pe­ri­od, rather than 25 years. Air Force of­fi­cials have said that the length­i­er pro­jec­tions made sense, giv­en that many of its tankers have al­ready been op­er­at­ing for 50 years.

EADS, bid­ding with Northrop Grum­man, won the ear­li­er con­test on­ly to have gov­ern­ment au­di­tors block the award af­ter Boe­ing filed a for­mal protest. The au­di­tors found that the Air Force had been too sub­jec­tive in eval­u­at­ing the bids and had giv­en EADS too much cred­it for some of the ex­tra fea­tures of its plane.

(New York Times)