Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Tuesday the Defense Department may accelerate the process of awarding the KC-X tanker contract now that Boeing is the sole remaining offeror after Northrop Grumman’s withdrawal from the contest on Monday. According to a Reuters news wire service report, Whitman said DOD “may be in a position” to reduce “some of those milestones” in the current timeline, which sets the deadline for turning in proposals in mid-May and anticipates the contract award around mid-September. Also on Tuesday, Jim Albaugh, head of Boeing’s commercial airplane sector, who ran Boeing’s defense business through August 2009, said the next move is up to the Pentagon. “It’s really in the hands of the customer right now, how they want to proceed,” he told attendees at an aviation conference in New York. (See also Bloomberg wire service’s March 9 report)
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.