On Mar 13, 1:14*pm, Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Jeff Dougherty wrote :







On Mar 13, 9:46 am, Kingfish wrote:
On Mar 13, 12:18 am, Jeff Dougherty
wrote:

I believe that the design Boeing offered to the USAF was not the
same as the one currently being built for Italy and Japan- it's
based on the 767-200LRF airframe rather than the 767-200ER. *And
while the airframes themselves have been flying since 2005, they
only started testing the refueling systems last year and none have
actually entered service yet. *First deliveries are supposed to be
in the first quarter of 2008. *It's still been around longer than
the A330-MRTT variant, but the disparity isn't as large as it first
appears.

Boeing still has a great deal more experience building tankers, of
course, but I'd hesitate to call either of these designs
significantly more mature than the other.

I recall Boeing's Advanced Tanker was some kind of hybrid, like you
said it's based on the 767-200LRF but it has a different wing. (can't
find a source for this) The 767 has been around longer than the A330
for sure, but I don't think that lessens the risk in developing a
refueler based on that plane. Either airplane would be a huge
improvement over the creaky KC-135 (now I'm reading they may not be
in as bad a shape as was previously believed)

Per Aviation Leak at:
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/gener...y_generic.jsp?
channel=awst&i
d=news/aw031008p2.xml

The airframe that was actually being offered, the -200LRF, appears to
still be in development. *According to the article, it had the
airframe of a 767-200, wings from the -300F freighter, and cockpit and
empennage from the -400ER model. *The 767 is a proven airframe, but
I'm not sure that putting together all those parts and trying to make
them work together is a low-risk strategy.

It's been done for years by all sorts of manufacturers, including
Boeing.

Fair enough. The AvLeak article made it sound like a relatively high-
risk approach that turned off the Air Force, but the key word there
may be "relatively". Thanks for the clarification- I'm not even
remotely familiar with airliner manufacture and I guess it showed.

It'll be interesting to see how this all turns out. At the risk of
pontificating (again) about something I don't really understand, it
seems to me that the real take-home lesson is that we can look forward
to pretty much every major defense contract award being protested
unless and until the rules are changed. There's pretty much no
downside to losing the protest, and it gives you the potential to
swing the contract and all the associated millions. I wonder how long
it will be before procurement officers start building time into their
project schedules to deal with "routine" protests? :-)

-JTD