A stalled $23.5 billion US Air Force plan to lease and buy modified 767 aircraft from Boeing Co still could be concluded despite a decision to suspend negotiations for at least several more months, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
"There's a range of things that could occur," Lawrence Di Rita, the Defense Department's chief spokesman, said a day after the Pentagon deferred a decision until after the November 2 presidential election on modernizing the ageing US aerial tanker fleet.
Asked whether the $23.5 billion deal to lease 20 and buy up to 80 Boeing 767s still could be signed, he said it "is conceivably one of the things that could occur."
Other possibilities include inviting new bids and "some combination of capability that could be determined" after the scheduled completion in November of an Air Force analysis of alternatives and a study by the Pentagon's director of program analysis and evaluation, Di Rita said.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had deferred a decision on how to modernize the tanker fleet until the studies were wrapped up.
Rumsfeld suspended tanker negotiations with Boeing on December 1 after the company fired former Air Force official Darleen Druyun and Michael Sears, its chief financial officer, for negotiating a job while Druyun was still overseeing the tanker deal at the Air Force.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said on Tuesday he thought Rumsfeld had "made the appropriate decision to return to square one and take a new look at the tanker issue from the ground up."
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has led opposition to what he called a sweetheart deal for Boeing, said Rumsfeld's decision "appears fatal to at least the lease component of the (Boeing) proposal."
The chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter, urged Wednesday that the process of acquiring Boeing 767s start early in fiscal 2005, which begins October 1.
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