Says C-295 Rated Equal To Competitor, And It's Cheaper

In a release issued Wednesday, the Team JCA partnership led by Raytheon and EADS CASA North America detailed the reasons it is contesting the Joint Cargo Aircraft selection process. As ANN reported, the team filed its protest June 22 with the Government Accountability Office.

"Following a 'debrief' from the US Army, Team JCA carefully considered the Army's selection process and weighed the merits and challenges of an award protest," said Jon Jones, president of Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. "We decided that a protest was necessary based on crucial portions of our proposal that were either incorrectly measured or not considered during the source selection process.

"We took this action to understand what it takes to meet the needs of our customer and to better support our nation's warfighters," Jones added. A team led by L-3 Communications and Boeing, offering the C-27J Spartan, won the contract bid.

Team JCA is offering the EADS CASA C-295 military transport for the JCA requirement. The protest centers on three key points, according to Raytheon:

• The JCA source selection board rated Team JCA equal to its competitor on all non-price factors in its criteria, including technical, logistics, management/production and past performance.
• Raytheon beat its competitor's price by more than 15 percent
• There were errors in the specific evaluation of data and the application of the evaluation criteria

"By the best value criteria in the JCA request for proposals, we are convinced that Raytheon has the best value solution," Jones said.

In military service with coalition partners worldwide, the C-295 is completing its seventh year of JCA-type missions with the armed services of Spain, Poland, Algeria, Jordan, Brazil, Portugal and Finland.

EADS CASA has 55 aircraft on order, 32 of which have already been delivered.

FMI: www.raytheon.com, www.us-c295.com/