PennyStockGuru. As I have laid out in all my posts on military air-to-air refueling, it is my view that any company capable of providing "probe-and-drogue" type refueling will get a USN contract - due to the shortfall in USN capacity to meet its requirements without diverting USAF assets and the USAF having multiple problems of its own - provided that the company can meet the readiness requirements required by the USN.

The readiness requirements come in 3 categories:

- The ability to fill longer term scheduled requirements such as major exercise requirements and periodic receiver crew recertification requirements.

- On call tasking for daily requirements - local base requirements and trials of new / experimental / test aircraft.

- Deployed operations in non-hostile airspace.

So it will depend on whether TMPS was bidding against a gold plated requirement with all the above or a lesser but still useful worthwhile requirement with some of the above and how convincing they were in assuring that they would be ready by any set start date (or there could have been some negotiation as to a start date at some point in FY 2019).

If not this year they should certainly be ready for FY2020.

In addition of course, there are numerous other one-off contracts to pitch for such as US Foreign Military Sales aircraft delivery flights to overseas air arms and NATO requirements for exercises and rotational deployments from home base to operational deployments for the Global War on Terrorism (any country with F/A-18s).