Come on, you know the end… Well, if U.S. Aerospace didn’t know the end before, they certainly do now.
Late is unacceptable.
After their late delivery (by five minutes) of an already last minute bid for the KC-X tanker contract, U.S. Aerospace has filed a complaint with the GAO. Since the tanker competition clearly needed an extra dose of juvenile behavior, the California-based firm has claimed that U.S. Air Force officials:
… may have intentionally delayed the messenger from delivering our proposal, in order to create a pretext for refusing to consider it because they have political issues with our Eastern European supplier, thus violating the requirement that the program be a fair and equal competition, open to all qualified bidders.
Or… they could have just rejected the hastily thrown together proposal on its merits, but I suppose that’s an unfair assumption…
The company includes a very detailed explanation for their tardiness:
Our proposal was hand delivered on July 9, 2010. The messenger arrived at the government installation, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, well before 1:30 pm, more than half an hour before the 2:00 pm deadline. Air Force personnel initially denied the messenger entry to the base, then gave incorrect directions to 1755 Eleventh Street Building 570, and finally instructed the messenger to wait where he was for Air Force personnel to come and get him. He at all times complied with the instructions of Air Force personnel, from the time he arrived at the installation until the proposal was taken by Air Force personnel at the program building. Although the proposal was arbitrarily marked received at 2:05 pm, it was under Air Force control before the bid deadline.
I wonder… did the dog eat the first copy too?
