The Air Force will pay Boeing $1.387 million in compensation for the legal costs that the company incurred in its successful protest of the service’s February choice of Northrop Grumman in the KC-X tanker contest, an Air Force spokeswoman tells the Daily Report. The Government Accountability Office found that the Air Force errors in judging Northrop’s KC-30 and Boeing’s KC-767 entries call for the service to reimburse Boeing for its legal costs. The Air Force reached “an agreement with Boeing” on the amount, the spokeswoman said. The KC-X program is in limbo, awaiting the new Administration, after the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s aborted attempt to reopen the competition to revised bids and determine the winner by around the end of the year.
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.