WASHINGTON – Boeing Company said it will formally protest a $35B Air Force contract awarded to European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company and Northrop Grumman Corp. on Monday.

The Chicago-based aerospace company “found serious flaws in the process that we believe warrant appeal,” Boeing’s chairman and CEO, Jim McNerney, said in a statement.

Boeing’s protest, to be filed Tuesday, compounds existing pressure on Air Force officials to explain their decision to award the high-stakes deal to a European company instead of an American one. Air Force officials have said the impact on American jobs was not one of their criteria for awarding the contract. Air Force officials will testify before House and Senate committees on Tuesday.
The company argued that the Air Force changed its method for evaluating the two tankers even after issuing a request for proposals. These changes allowed a larger tanker to be competitive even though the Air Force originally had called for a medium-sized plane. Air Force officials have indicated that the larger size of the tanker offered by the EADS/Northrop team helped tip the balance in its favor.

“We didn’t think they wanted a bigger plane,” Jim Albaugh, head of Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems unit, said last week. Albaugh said this is why Boeing based its offering on Boeing’s 767, “we were discouraged from offering the 777,” a bigger aircraft that would have been more comparable to the winning bid.