Academic

Alabama's Finest Moment: The Airbus Air Force Contract

By Dan Filler

The Air Force has announced that an Airbus/Northrop Grumman consortium won a massive contract to provide 179 air tankers.   The NY Times (and everyone else) calls it a shocker:

The Air Force, in a stunning upset against the Boeing Company, awarded a $40 billion contract for aerial refueling tankers on Friday to a partnership between Northrop Grumman and the European parent of Airbus, putting a critical military contract partly into the hands of a foreign company....?We are outraged that this decision taps European Airbus and its foreign workers to provide a tanker to our American military,? the Washington State delegation said in a joint statement. Boeing planes are assembled outside of Seattle. ?This is a blow to the American aerospace industry, American workers and America?s men and women in uniform,? the statement added.... ?This isn?t an upset,? said Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area research group. ?It?s an earthquake.?

Well, maybe not so much.  The folks in Washington State, Chicago, New York and DC might have been blindsided.    But there was plenty of American support for this decision - and I'm betting a lot of it was coming from the little state that could: Alabama.  The Washington Post hints as much and the Mobile Press Register reports at length about how the contract may generate up to 6500 jobs in the state.  I have to think that Senators Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby  pushed hard behind the scenes on this one.  Governor Bob Riley was, shall we say, ebullient:

"To say this is a great day for Alabama is a monumental understatement.  This will go down in history as one of our greatest days."

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on March 01, 2008 (boomark / email).