Alabama Opens Its Wallet to Woo Airbus

摘要

In June 2011, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley traveled to the Paris Air Show, Europe's largest aerospace industry gathering, in hopes of luring foreign investment to his state. Of the dozen meetings he lined up, the most important was with Tom Enders, then chief executive officer of the giant European aircraft maker Airbus. The two had never met, but they were familiar with each other. Six months earlier Airbus's parent company, EADS, had lost a bid for a $35 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to build military tankers at the Brookley Aeroplex, an 1,800-acre site in Alabama's port city of Mobile. Airbus had spent years lobbying the Pentagon and was narrowly beaten by its rival Boeing.