

5 Minute Delay Scuttles Chance at $40 Billion Air Force Deal - edw519
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/minute-delay-scuttles-chance-40-billion-air-force/story?id=11342682

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pclark
Why would you leave only 30 minutes before the deadline to hand in a proposal
for billions of dollars?

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buro9
Indeed.

And there's a view that if you couldn't get the proposal in ahead of the
deadline then just how are you going to get the project in on a deadline? Even
with a proposal you should attempt to get it in early and to exceed
expectations.

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joezydeco
Have you ever prepared an estimate for a project with any unknowns? Can you
make sure that plane on the blueprint can be successfully manufactured? Can
your vendors deliver on time? Where are your vendor quotes? Are they all on
time?

Having done quotes for a government agency, they always ask for you to do
these estimates in half the normal time, but then take four times as long to
get back to you with an answer.

And really, the quote was _at the door of the base_ before the deadline. Do
you really need to have it on a certain desk 500 yards away from the front
door to be considered in? That's just being pedantic at that point.

~~~
buro9
> Have you ever prepared an estimate for a project with any unknowns?

Yes.

I've been involved with major IT delivery within the UK for GCHQ and the Home
Office.

It sucked in a major amount of resource to get it done, and we still made sure
that we submitted it a week early.

If there are further questions that your proposal didn't cover you can always
answer them later. Miss the deadline, and there will never be questions.

~~~
joezydeco
This last quote I worked on required the proposal to be uploaded to the
agency's fancy new web server. Efficient and technologically savvy, right?

Wrong. Every vendor tried to upload their 2GB proposal to the server about 15
minutes before the deadline, crashing their server in the process. Thankfully
_no_ vendor got a quote in on time, so the deadline was extended three hours
to let uploading finish. But I'm guessing if one or two got completed and the
rest were still in HTTP limbo, they would have let those vendors fail.

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sorbus
So, they decided, a week before the deadline, to bid. Then they had to ask for
two extra months because they weren't prepared. Then they sent it in at the
last minute, and, predictably, it didn't get there on time. I have absolutely
no sympathy for them.

It's worth noting that the airforce told them, after the delay at the gate
prevented the papers from getting there ontime, that "the company should have
anticipated this potential snag and planned appropriately." Not being able to
get the papers there by the deadline, and planning to get them there just
before the deadline, does not say anything good about their ability to
actually fulfill the contract, were they to be granted it.

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philwelch
The idea of importing a plane manufactured by Antonov, of all manufacturers,
would have been really interesting--the US armed forces have never adopted,
wholesale[1], equipment from the former Soviet Union, despite many good
arguments to do so. Soviet equipment was always cheaper to maintain, and since
they are our primary rivals, we can keep up just by importing their stuff
instead of wasting money designing our own.

[1] For intelligence purposes, the US has always at least tried to get a few
MiG's and Sukhoi's over the past few decades, and keep them in flying
condition. Nowadays they can outright buy them--Wikipedia says the military
bought two Sukhoi's from Ukraine in 2009.

~~~
ergo98
>Soviet equipment was always cheaper to maintain, and since they are our
primary rivals, we can keep up just by importing their stuff instead of
wasting money designing our own.

The US has virtually always been a generation ahead of Soviet/Russia military
technology. There was a mythology about Soviet military prowess during the
cold war that was based more on lubricating incredible military spends
("Better checkbox that new project because of that dominant new Soviet
fighter") more than it was based on reality.

~~~
philwelch
That's always been the difference though--American equipment is more advanced
but with tighter tolerances and harder to maintain, Soviet equipment is less
advanced but more fault tolerant and easier to maintain. So you end up with
stuff like the M16 jamming in Vietnam or the Apache completely crippled by
sandy conditions in Iraq.

~~~
Maktab
This may be true for basic equipment like assault rifles, but I haven't seen
any indication that more complex equipment like fighter aircraft are cheaper
to maintain or more reliable in Soviet/Russian guise.

As a case in point, I've spoken to some people involved in a project to re-
engine the South African Air Force's Mirage F1AZ fighter aircraft with the
Russian Klimov RD-33 engine as used in the MiG-29. Technically, the project
was a success as all the technical obstacles were overcome and aircraft's
performance figures improved significantly, but the project was scuppered in
the end by Klimov's apparent inability to get the engine's reliability and
ease of maintenance to anywhere close to that of the aging Snecma Atar 09K50s
originally fitted to the aircraft. The conclusion in the end was that if the
SA Air Force wanted to go ahead with the project it would need to stockpile a
large quantity of spare engines and other parts and swap them out frequently,
something that introduced enough cost and difficulty to negate the performance
gains that would've been achieved, so the project was shelved.

The SA Air Force has remained wary of Russian military equipment ever since.
When the time came to order a new fighter it decided on the cheap to maintain
JAS-39C/D Gripen from Saab in Sweden despite having received an attractive
price on new MiG-29s.

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Malcx
Rules are rules.

As a CS student many years ago we had a 10am deadline for all work - I missed
it once by less than 60 seconds.

The punishment was always 20% of your mark deducted immediatly, with no
excusses.

A great learning experience at an impressionable age, so now in my
professional life I've never missed a deadline though my own fault.

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InclinedPlane
Alternate title: $40 billion deal blown by unprofessional company who couldn't
be bothered to show up on time.

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ergo98
The less interesting version: A completely unprofessional company with a
ridiculously unsubstantiated bid can't read rules.

Seriously, though, in bidding processes like this rules _have_ to be enforced.
One of the reasons the first, expensive round of bids got nullified was
because rules weren't always followed.

~~~
philwelch
The main reason is that in the original competition, Boeing (a huge American
company with senators pulling for it from at least one state) lost to a
foreign company, which pissed off the protectionists and jingoes enough to
want to run the whole thing over again.

~~~
Confusion
Northrop isn't a foreign company and as the party delivering the actual
planes, a substantial amount of the money would have gone to them.

