The EADS/Northrop Gruman tanker proposal was superior to Boeing's in every regard, says tanker guru Loren Thompson of the Lexington Insitute.

"Boeing didn't manage to beat Northrop in a single measure of merit," Thompson wrote in a Monday morning online note.

When Thompson talks about tankers, I listen. He runs an inside-the-Beltway think tank, he's got great access to Pentagon decision makers and he's forgotten more about this long-running tanker saga than most of us will ever know.

Thompson said the the biggest issue is that the Air Force thought the KC-30 was simply better than Boeing's proposed KC-767. "The Northrop offering was deemed to offer superior refueling and airlift capacity at 1,000 (nautical mile) range and substantially superior refueling and airlift capability at 2,000 (nautical mile) range."

Boeing also was bitten by its failure to deliver on recent defense contracts including the long-delayed KC-767 tankers for the Japanese and Italian air forces. Thompson said Pentagon officials also didn't buy Boeing's cost calculations for developing the tanker, which led them to discount the company's assertions that the KC-767 would be cheaper to operate.

And the fact that Boeing would have built the tankers on existing Everett assembly lines didn't carry much weight either, Thompson said, because the KC-767 tanker was substaintially different from the roughly 1,000 767s Boeing has built. "The Boeing proposal was initially rated as high-risk because reviewers felt the company was offering a plane that in many regards had never been built before, and yet claiming it could be built fast at relatively low cost."

All in all, he concluded, "although both proposals satisfied all performance requirements, the reviewers concluded that if they funded the Northrop Grumman proposal they could have 49 superior tankers operating by 2013, whereas if they funded the Boeing proposal, they would have only 19 considerably less capable planes in that year."