Tanker Wars: Boeing challenged

Source URL: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/272243_tankers01.html
Posted at: http://www.air-attack/com/news/news_article/1678

MOBILE, Ala. -- Around the time Bill Boeing was incorporating his airplane manufacturing business in Seattle in 1916, another aviation pioneer was preparing to set up shop in this Alabama town on the Gulf Coast.

O.E. Williams, who had started an aviation school and airplane-making business in Pennsylvania and then moved it to Michigan, was looking at property in Mobile, where the weather would allow him and his students to fly more often. He settled on a 53-acre farm on what would later become part of the military's Brookley Field.

Today, the former base, which closed in 1969, could become a major assembly plant for air-refueling tankers for the U.S. Air Force. Only these would not be Boeing-made jets like the 1950s-era KC-135s that the Air Force currently operates.

They would be Airbus jets.

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