Allan McArtor, chairman of Airbus North America, yesterday defended his company against attacks on its aerial refueling tanker airframe.
The fight between Boeing [BA] and Airbus’s parent company, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. (EADS), to make the Air Force’s next aerial refueling tanker is just one battle in a larger war for the world’s civil and military aerospace market.
In that competition, EADS is partnered with Northrop Grumman [NOC], which to date has been out front in talking about the competition worth an estimated $40 billion for the first purchase of 179 planes.
That changed yesterday, when McArtor addressed the program during a National Press Club briefing with reporters.
“As a company we’ve been quiet, maybe too quiet,” McArtor said. “Too quiet about our role in the U.S. economy. Maybe too quiet about the real trade policies of our government and perhaps too quiet about the way we compete for mission critical military procurements.”
He spoke about the larger issues facing the two companies in terms of civil aviation and world trade matters. And then he turned to the tanker competition.
Boeing has chosen not to debate the technical merits of its aircraft and instead has attacked the capacity of its labor force in the Gulf Coast and the reliability of NATO countries, he said.
Specifically, McArtor referenced statements made recently at the Air Force Association that led to a chain of letters between Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Boeing’s top brass.
In one of those letters, James Albaugh, the president of Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems, said Boeing believes creating a new plant in Alabama will pose more risk than working in an existing plant in Washington state (Defense Daily, Oct. 8).
But that response made the situation even worse, McArtor said, wondering rhetorically how Boeing’s employees in Huntsville must feel. Later, he turned to comments made about EADS’ partners in NATO.
“Absent a solid technical argument, my competitor has painted NATO countries as being potentially unreliable suppliers to a tanker program and that might create a readiness risk for our Air Force,” McArtor said, tossing in a barb about Boeing’s failure to deliver KC-767 tanker airplanes to Japan and Italy on time.
Bill Barksdale, a spokesman for Boeing, said he refused to speak directly to statements about the Alabama dustup or NATO partners, calling McArtor’s statements “both unfounded and outrageous.”
Boeing has emphasized the merits of its plane and described exactly how its planes will be built in Everett, Wash., and Witchita, Kan., Barksdale said.