Originally Posted by
Commando Cody
It's unlikely this was a low bid (in governmentalese "Lowest Price Technically Acceptable") competition. Those are used when, "... requirements are well defined; risk of unsuccessful contract performance is minimal...". Causally this is an off the shelf item or something that is very similar to regular commercial items with no major development or unique requirements expected.
FLRAA isn't that kind of a program.
I have no idea what price either company proposed, but even if the SB>1 came in at a lower bid price,aside from the performance differences the Army would hove to look at what was accomplished by both competitors in the JMR-TD phase to give them a feel for how likely it was that the bidder could achieve what they promised. Clearly Bell had an advantage here, not only for Valor's performance and demonstrations, but also with a history of successful Tilt-Rotor types stretching back to the 1980s, giving more confidence they'd be able to do what they promised.. This would also be factored in the decision. This definitely wasn't just a price shootout. Now the SB>1 team could protest, but there's a risk.If there's a protest lodged, the Gov't is free to defend itself by releasing data that would normally not be disclosed, in order to justify its decision.
Back in the late 1970s, the Coast Guard put out an RFP fpr a "Short Range Recocery (SRR) Aircraft". The Competitors were Bell with its Model 222 and Aerospatiale with a modified version of their 365C. The 365C won and became the HH-65. Bell protested, and so the Gov't released details of the evaluations that normally they wouldn't in order to defend their choice. This revealed that the 365C was not just better, it was a lot better. Once this data became public, it unquestionably would affect sales. The [unverified} story goes that the Bell team, including Marketing, didn't have the nerve to go into the lion's den of top management and tell them,"Our helicopter wasn't nearly as good" and so didn't object to the protest so that it would be the Gov't who would break the bad news. Now that story may be anecdotal, but I could see Sikorsky (and to a lesser extent Boeing) not going forward with a protest for similar reasons. They want to continue with X2 technology and there [i]may be stuff they just don't want to go public...
in my copy of Athur Pearcys book, the Bell 222 proposed for the USCG role looks suspiciously like it had a S-76A tailboom put on it,
Sikorsky also offered their 76..
cheers