5 Minute Delay Scuttles Chance at $40 Billion Air Force Deal | Hacker News Reader

5 Minute Delay Scuttles Chance at $40 Billion Air Force Deal

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23 pointsedw51916 comments

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Maybe. Yet the way they manage to force the process to be rerun is to find events like someone allowing an entry 5 minutes past the deadline.

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.

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