Airbus Criticizes Latest U.S. Air Force Specs for Refueling Tanker

SEVILLE, SPAIN — European Aeronautic Defense and Space said Tuesday that the U.S. Air Force’s latest specifications for a $50 billion contract to build aerial-refueling tankers would not yield any significant technological improvement on the capabilities of America’s already outdated tanker fleet.

The European plane maker and its U.S. partner, Northrop Grumman, have said they would withdraw from the competition if the rules were not revised, a position that Sean O’Keefe, the new head of EADS’s North American operations, reiterated Tuesday.

“The current draft request for proposals is not a tanker modernization program, it is just a replacement program” for the existing fleet of Eisenhower-era U.S. tankers, Mr. O’Keefe told journalists.

The Pentagon’s list of 373 mandatory features for the new plane gives equal weight to all of them, Mr. O’Keefe said, “which means there is no evaluation of any capability that exceeds the baseline requirements. Anything bigger, better or longer in range is of less value” in the competition, which pits EADS, the parent company of Airbus, and Northrop against Boeing.

The Air Force has not set a deadline for submitting its final request for proposals, but industry executives expect that a decision will likely be made by the end of January or early February.

If Northrop and Airbus were to decide not to bid, the Pentagon would be left with one bidder, meaning that it might end up paying more than it might have.

Northrop and Airbus won a competition for the tankers in 2008 but U.S. government auditors overturned that award after Boeing filed a protest over the procedure.

The Air Force picked the Northrop-led bid after it offered a more versatile plane at a cheaper price. But Boeing complained that its rivals had been given extra points for basing their offer on the Airbus A330, a larger plane than the 767 that Boeing’s offer was based on. Boeing argued that the A330-based tanker would have higher operating costs.

Thomas O. Enders, the chief executive of Airbus, said that the company’s decision on whether to remain in the bidding for the tanker depended on “whether we get a fair and balanced chance in a highly politicized competition.”

“If I had a wish free for the new year, it would be for the Pentagon to come up with a fair” bidding contest, he said.

Advocates for Boeing in Washington have argued that Airbus should be disqualified from consideration for the tanker contract following a report last year by the World Trade Organization, which found that the European plane maker had received billions of dollars in illegal subsidies for several of its airplanes in the past.

“The U.S. government cannot reward illegal market actions that have harmed U.S. manufacturers and stolen U.S. aerospace jobs,” Representative Norm Dicks, a Democrat from Boeing’s home state of Washington, said in September.

The W.T.O is due to rule this spring on a counterclaim by the European Union that argues Boeing, too, has received illegal government support in the form of tax breaks and generous U.S. government contracts.

In an interview, Mr. Enders dismissed the trade disputes before the W.T.O. as “anachronistic” and irrelevant to the tanker competition.

“The aerospace world of tomorrow will not be bilateral anymore,” he said, noting that China, Japan, Brazil, and Russia were among the countries aspiring to challenge the Boeing-Airbus duopoly in commercial aircraft. “Bilateral agreements are not relevant anymore, particularly if you want to find a new scheme for the future.”