The honchos at Longacres may know by now whether Boeing or the EADS/Northrop Gruman joint venture has won a $40 billion contract to provide 179 aerial refueling tankers to the U.S. Air Force.

A key Pentagon committee met this afternoon (East Coast time) to make a final decision. After that, they're expected to notify the competing bidders, then make a public announcement before the end of the week on whether they're buying Everett-built KC-767s or KC-30s that would be built in a proposed new factory in Alabama.

And at last, we'll have resolution to the long-running tanker drama, our long national defence procurement nightmare and the story that threatens to eat my brain.

Oh who am I kidding? Knowledgable insiders say that If Boeing loses the contract, it will appeal the decision. And if EADS/Northrop loses, it's a safe bet they will too. That will throw the procurement process into the political realm, which means that today's meeting is merely a landmark along the way to the final tanker decision.

There will be Congressional hearings and a long summer of overblown rhetoric and sustained gusts of glacier-melting hot air, and in the end, Boeing's Blue State supporters in a Congress controlled by Democrats will probably be the deciding factor - unless the process gets drawn out long enough that a newly elected President McCain (R-Airbus) gets to weigh in, at which point all bets are off.

Still, when you think about it - as go-to analyst Richard Aboulafia noted during his recent Lynnwood foray - all of this sturm und drang is centered on a relatively small potatoes deal. This tanker contract may be the biggest warplane order in recent years, but at full production, it still amounts to only 14 planes a year. Boeing plans to build six times that many 777s a year in the same Everett factory where it would assemble the tankers.

Given that, Aboulafia says (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek), "I don't see what all the fuss is about."

And speaking of 777s - have you seen this video, taken up at Everett during a recently delivery ceremony for a new Cathay Pacific Triple-Seven? The unauthorized low-altitude fly-by got the pilot fired.

Meanwhile, Boeing, Grays Harbor-based Imperium Resources and Virgin Atlantic took a step towards saving the planet over the weekend, with the first trans-Atlantic flight powered by biodiesel.

Greenpeace responded by calling the flight a cheap publicity stunt, with a spokesman blasting Sir Richard Branson's airline for "using this flight to divert attention from an irresponsible, business-as-usual attitude to climate change."

Of course, someone could argue that the whole fight over the amount of pollution commercial jets put into the atmosphere is a cheap publicity stunt -global experts estimate that a whopping 2 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide come from airliners. Perhaps Branson's biofuel research pounds would be better-spent on reducing pollution caused by our ground-based transport systems.