GAO denies protest over aircraft contract

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Thursday denied a protest filed by Raytheon after the Pentagon awarded the contract for the Joint Cargo Aircraft to rival L-3 Communications Holdings.

Raytheon filed its protest with the GAO in late June, pointing to a large price difference between its offering and that of L-3 Communications. Company officials argued that the government violated its own rules by awarding a contract for a higher-priced aircraft with only marginally higher performance.

{mosads}In its bid for the Joint Cargo Aircraft (JCA), a program shared by the Army and Air Force, Raytheon partnered with the North American subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and offered EADS’s C-295 aircraft.

L-3 Communications, which teamed up with Alenia North America, also offered a plane of European origin: the C-27J, made by Italy’s Finmeccanica SpA’s Alenia unit. Boeing is part of the winning team and plans to start a U.S. assembly line for the C-27J.

At press time, the GAO was still working on redacting proprietary information in the process of preparing a public version of the ruling to be released by next week.

“We are pleased to have this last hurdle behind us and are proud to have been selected for the JCA,” Giuseppe Giordo, president and CEO of Alenia North America, said in a statement.

The Army’s and Air Force’s selection of the C-27J marks a boon for the Florida and Mississippi congressional delegations.

The L-3 team announced last year that it had selected Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Fla., as the site for production and final assembly and said it would establish an engineering, logistics and support center in Madison, Miss., if the C-27J were selected.

The L-3 team’s contract for the JCA is of an estimated $2.04 billion to supply a minimum of 78 aircraft.

A spokeswoman for Raytheon said the company had not yet had the opportunity to review the GAO decision and had no comment.