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Paul Shearon: Refueling tanker column skips the facts

Letter to the editor  —  5/31/2008 7:05 am

Dear Editor: In his column ("The best refueling tanker won," May 26) CEO Ronald Sugar failed to address the most critical facts about the growing scandal involving the Air Force award of this $35 billion contract on tankers to EADS/Northrop.

Sugar has tried to downplay the role of Europe's EADS, which is producing the aircraft that Northrop will help retrofit as a tanker. EADS is using an airframe -- the A330 -- built with illegal subsidies that are the subject of the largest-ever suit before the World Trade Organization. With bipartisan support, the suit has pointed out that these subsidies have helped kill over 65,000 U.S. aerospace jobs.

EADS has identified several thousand jobs that could be supported as a result of their winning the contract, but their assertions have not been backed up by independent data. Boeing's tanker would have supported more than 44,000 jobs.

We are concerned that the U.S. Air Force engaged in procedural misconduct in making last-minute changes to the evaluation criteria to benefit EADS/Northrop, disfavoring Boeing's more versatile airframe, deleting provisions intended to dissuade EADS from using European subsidies for its tanker project, and exempting EADS/Northrop from export laws that restrict sensitive technologies from being exported to rogue countries.

We need to be careful about empty promises, backroom deals with foreign contractors that undermine our defense and trade laws, and arrangements that spend our tax dollars to off-shore thousands of U.S. jobs in a leading American industry.

Paul Shearon

International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, AFL-CIO

Washington, D.C.

Letter to the editor  —  5/31/2008 7:05 am