EADS plans to concede Air Force tanker defeat (Reuters)

March 3, 2011 by Aubrey Cohen / seattlepi.com

EADS North America could announce as soon as Friday that it won’t protest the U.S. Air Force’s award of its $35 billion aerial refueling tanker contract to rival Boeing, Reuters reported Thursday. “Most likely there will be no appeal,” an unidentified source familiar with internal discussions at EADS told Reuters. Publicly, the company says it’s still evaluating information the Air Force provided in Monday’s debriefing. EADS has until March 10 to protest, and it should if the Air Force doesn’t give more details on its decision, the Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register said in a front-page editorial Thursday. (EADS would have assembled its tanker in Mobile.)