Boeing wins Air Force competition with Lockheed
By Charles Aldinger
WASHINGTON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The Air Force said on
Monday it will move $1.1 billion in aircraft maintenance work
from McClellan Air Force Base, California, to a Boeing Co.
facility in Texas and an Air Force maintenance center in
Utah.
Boeing, expected to received about $500 million of the work
in maintaining KC-135 tankers at Kelly AFB, Texas, was teamed
with the Air Force's Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill AFB,
Utah, in seeking the work over the next nine years.
Boeing and the service's Ogden Center won out in a
competition with Lockheed Martin Corp , which had sought
to take over all of the maintenance work and keep it at the
McClellan base in Sacramento, California.
The Air Force center at Ogden will maintain A-10 attack
jets and handle electronic and a variety of other maintenance
work for aircraft now being done by the Air Force at McClellan.
While the announcement was a stinging blow representing a
loss of several thousand jobs in Sacramento, it could be a step
toward clearing up a controversy between the White House and
Congress over domestic military base closings.
The McClellan facility was supposed to be shut down under a
broad agreement to close and realign a large numbers of domestic
U.S. military bases. But members of Congress accused President
Bill Clinton of breaking the agreement and promising to keep
maintenances job at McClellan and at Kelly AFB in order to win
votes in the last presidential election.
In announcing the winner of the McClellan maintenance
competition on Monday, Deputy Assistant Air Force Secretary
Darleen Druyun said politics had played no part in the
selection of Boeing and Ogden.
She said the $1.1 billion in maintenance work over a period
of nine years would mean a savings of $638 million to the Air
Force.
The Defense Department, backed by the White House, has
pressed Congress to agree to more painful domestic military
base closings but that move has thus far been flatly rejected.
The Air Force also announced last September that it was
moving its maintenance facility for C-5 cargo jets from Kelly to
Warner-Robins AFB, Georgia, a move that would cost San Antonio
1,200 jobs.
The service at that time awarded a $434 million, seven-year
C-5 work contract to its own maintenance facility at
Warner-Robins near Atlanta, which would gain some 725 jobs.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin lost bids against Warner-Robins to
maintain the big jets. It was the first such major competition
between private firms and government facilities for aircraft
maintenance.
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