Originally Posted by
LowObservable
And if my Auntie had a **** she'd be my Uncle. None of these things were material in this case (I am sure you would already have listed them in excruciating detail if they were), and indeed such matters are seldom an issue in professionally run responses.
You clearly missed the point. My point was that my two statements, which were combined sans context, were characterized as being contradictory. They were not. They addressed two very different things, which my clearly flippant "Enterprise" remark attempted to emphasize. You apparently missed the joke.
And for the record, as I previously stated, I believe the final Airbus proposal was non compliant in the sense that it proposed an airliner configuration tanker with an option to add a main deck cargo door and floor. The airliner configuration met all the key performance parameters, and so it made sense to offer it, but it did not deliver a freighter configuration.
As an example, for their JSF bid McDonnell Douglas offered a solution that met or exceeded all the key performance parameters by a significant margin. So surely, they gotta be in like Flynn. So it would seem, but no. There was one problem. When their gas coupled lift fan failed, they substituted a lift engine on their STOVL version. Their bid was thrown out because it did not meet the "single engine" requirement.
If this is true, MDC and the customers were both incompetent. But I don't recall that it was: underestimating the customer's resistance to LPLC was only one of many flaws in the MDC-led proposal.
So you and I have a difference of opinion concerning events of nearly a quarter century ago. Harry Stonecipher, head of MDC at the time of MDC's loss of the "must-win" JSF contest, provided his opinion at the time they occurred. According to Flight Global:
Stonecipher admits that the MDC-led team's near tail-less aircraft design and complex engine installations were a calculated gamble. The concept included a lift-plus-lift/cruise STOVL configuration. As designed, a forward gas-turbine engine, mounted behind the cockpit, offers vertical lift, while the main power plant provides rear lift and conventional forward thrust. He feels MDC lost because the propulsion concept was considered "higher risk".