America is going to pay for the cronyism that merged every airplane manufacturer into one and eliminated internal competition. If you don't have internal competition, you'll collapse in the face of external competition. There is no way to get away from Boeing without getting away from the American aerospace industry entirely, a problem that didn't exist back when McDonnell Douglas was around.
A large part of the problem with Boeing is McDonnell Douglas. After the merger, the corporate culture of McDonnell Douglas was transplanted into Boeing. Their HQ was moved from Seattle to Chicago and money was spent on buying back stock instead of long-term R&D.
Assembly facilities being moved to the south because "it's cheaper" didn't help either. Engineers and technicians are not really just cogs in a wheel where you can replace one with another and get the same results. You lose a lot in the way of "informal knowledge base" when you do that.
This has very little to do with that. McDonnel Douglass had no equivalent to the 757 really either. (The MD-11 was a suitable replacement for the 767, if you wanted a 3-hole aircraft)
I'm absolutely certain that if Boeing was making a 757NG like aircraft, United would have bought those. When it comes down to it, Boeing has no direct replacement for the 757. Airbus does, so United bought airbus.
If Boeing had wanted to play ball on an NMA aircraft, United definitely would have purchased them. Instead they abandoned their smaller 787 variant and didn't pursue NMA at all, leaving the door wide open for Airbus.
Boeing stopped making the plane because the situations that led to its existence evaporated, and it looked as if there would never be more demand again, and the world seemed to be trending to 737 size aircraft in ever increasing numbers.
My suspicion: the whole world lets the FAA validate airplanes and then sort of rubber stamps. Boeing was able to capture the FAA, but Airbus wasn't(since it's a foreign company). As such Airbus is still working with a proper adversarial regulator, whereas Boeing can get away with more cut corners. Eventually that screwed them.
The EUs move for greater local safety review, ironically, might make Airbus less safe, since they might be able to capture the EU regulators.
[edit] to emphasize: it's not market competition or the EU being better than the USA that's different. It's just the quasi-monopoly the FAA has on global aviation safety checks and the effect it has on foreign versus local companies.
In fairness, if there were multiple US aircraft manufacturers, they might battle each other for FAA regulatory capture and prevent either of them from achieving it.
[double edit] For the reverse of this see Dieselgate: discovered by some random American(named of all things John German) and pushed into the limelight by the EPA or whatever. It's not a perfect metaphor since he worked for an NGO, but arguably even civil society faces a sort of funder capture. Would German environmental NGOs have blown the whistle on something like this? Maybe?
> Would German environmental NGOs have blown the whistle on something like this? Maybe?
I think yes, it's just that they expected the regulatory system to work. Companies intentionally defeating emissions tests, unthinkable! ... just as unthinkable as the FAA rubberstamping whatever Boeing puts in front of them :(
> Airbus is still working with a proper adversarial regulator
I'm not sure this is true in a practical sense. For example, Airbus does the same unbelievable things with AoA sensors that Boeing did with MCAS: even if they have two or three of them on an aircraft, they don't compare them before allowing one sensor to drive automatic functions, so a single failed sensor can cause the airplane to do unexpected and dangerous things (for example, multiple uncommanded pitch down events on Quantas Flight 72). A true adversarial regulator would never have allowed such design flaws.
The Qantas Flight 72 incident was quite a bit different, as all AoA sensors were working correctly. The issue was due to corruption on one of the CPU exploiting these AoA sensors value [1]. Though you are entirely correct that there was a design flaw and the incident should not have happened, since these corrupted values ended up overriding the correctly calculated ones from the other ADIRU units.
[1] "The exact nature of the corruption was that the ADIRU CPU erroneously re-labelled the altitude data word so that the binary data that represented 37,012 (the altitude at the time of the incident) would represent an angle of attack of 50.625 degrees." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Potential_tri...
Let's not forget that until the two MAX crashes, Boeing had an overall safer record for its 7x7 line than Airbus did with its equivalent passenger jets.
So the EU's "vaunted" adversarial regulator actually was doing a much worse job than the FAA.
I think you have both misunderstood the argument being made, and misrepresented the relative safety of Airbus and Boeing passenger jets – which, by my understanding, is broadly comparable.
Because Europe has not legalized corruption to the same degree as the US. Massive campaign contributions is not as common in Europe, hence large European multi-nationals likely don't have the same opportunity to change regulations to serve them.
Of course they can still influence politicians by talking about all the jobs they will provide etc. Also power in Europe is not centralized the same way as it is in the US. In the US you can lobby Washington DC.
American lobbyist companies started swarming Brüssels as soon as the EU started gaining more power over national legislation.
So there is potential for the EU to head in the US direction, but it isn't quite there yet.
> Massive campaign contributions is not as common in Europe
Also far more complex - the political groupings in europe (EPP, ALDE, etc) are far looser organizations than the US parties, and power is spread in lots of different levels. Most Euro countries are coalitions of smaller parties too, defence in depth.
The US and UK suffer from having just two parties that from time to time get all the power. Infiltrate one party and your time will come. Infiltrate both and you're safe.
Please stop that. Brussels is the English name for the city and clearly that letter does not exist in English. Alternatives are "Brussel" (Dutch) and "Bruxelles" (French). The closest to what you wrote is the German "Brüssel" (no S).
It is funny how you think there is no corruption in Brussels. Of course it is there! The rules of the game are though that we don't touch our own Corporations. So Brussels will look the other way when VW cheats their customers in the US and Washington won't care when let's say Google has its way in EU. The real difference is that corruption is somehow legalized in the USA (a.k.a "lobbying") while it's not in the EU, so you will just not know about VW CEO hadling bags of money to Brussels unelected environnmental commissar.
socialdemocrat didn't claim no corruption, simply not the same degree.
Corruption in Europe is different, and often more subtle, than in the US (have lived and worked in both) but I do feel that over the 30 years the US has really gotten a lot worse compared to the EU countries.
The corruption also flourished during communism, but in different apparent form. Before communism, I don't know. (But the Habsburg empires I expect were deeply corrupt too - but the "west" was deeply corrupt too so it also gets difficult to compare.)
yeah, but they will not attempt destroying them financially too. EU fines US companies as if it wanted to get rid of them from the market. Not like it'd like to just fine them.
Also, note, how during Trump presidency EU is so much more cautious with that. Cynic in me says that's the proof that it is and has always been political. US can go after VW, MB, BMW, Porsche, Siemens, etc. There is no way that no federal laws are violated with the scale od operations these companies have in the US. All it takes is skilled and ambitious US Attorney General on Trump orders. Look at Lufthansa. All they need to do, and there were gossips about it being implemented already, is to ban electronics on flights to the US due to "battery self-ignition risk". But exempt US based carriers. Remember customer is always right. And Germany's BEST customer (who also happens to provide military security) is the US. Some people in EU seem not to grasp this simple truth
EU law is proposed by the Commission, made up of appointed representatives of each member state's elected government. It's voted and amended by the directly elected members of the EU parliament.
This is HN not the Daily Mail comments section, let's keep this space free of baseless europhobic disinformation.
It's not, and it could easily have gone the other way. By not having any competition or diversification, countries expose themselves to tremendous risk: the balance of the aerospace industry rested on a coin flip and the US bet tails. Without the cronyism, we could have had many separate raffle tickets against Europe's one.
It seems like Airbus currently is different. Maybe the friction from it being very multinational prevented it from becoming like Boeing, maybe it will have its own big scandal in a month. Who knows. But currently, Airbus does look better.
I mean, it wasn’t a safety scandal, but the A380 was a huge disaster for the company. I’d be more comfortable getting on a notional A360 than a notional 797, but both companies have self-harmed recently.
It lost them money but it didn't hurt their brand. Those are great planes to fly in as a passenger, they're just not profitable in the end for Airbus.
Boeing can't even keep its newest plane in the skies, and may have killed off the 737 line for good. Think another revision after the MAX is ever going to be approved?
As well as being great to fly in (seriously, business class on the upper deck by the window is an absolute dream) they have that "WOW" factor that I haven't experienced since first seeing a 747 or Concorde.
The 737 needs to go away. It's a great plane from a different era (staircases instead of jetways). That era has long passed. They've been trying to shoehorn it in. Rather than scale up the 737 cockpit flight controls they could have scaled down the 777 cockpit. Or even developed an all new one license cockpit in the same vein as the A320 series.
I think that the MAX was about as modest as they could make it. That was really the point of the whole exercise. A more modern engine core with a smaller fan wouldn't have moved the fuel economy needle enough to justify a new model I don't think, and Boeing would have lost a lot of orders to the A320neo.
Everything would have been fine except there was so much pressure to make every change as modest as possible that it didn't quite all work. They needed to either make significant changes to the landing gear or significant changes to the flight control computer and they chose neither.
787 doesn't fill the same role as 737 and A320, it's a much larger plane that carries more passengers. 737 and A320 seem to be much more popular for domestic flights within the US than larger planes.
Airbus scandal won’t come “in a month”: Boeing’s problems became public in 2013 and it is the same problem over and over.
- The Ducommon airframes in 2013, problem is FAA delegated certification to Boeing,
- The batteries, albeit smaller,
- The MAX, 2 crashes due to oversight and to the FAA delegating certification to Boeing.
Boeing’s problem didn’t come in a day, but in 20 years since the merge with MD, who had the same lose and fast culture. Airbus is safe for the time being, even if risks always exist, political instability for example. Not the case for the moment.
This is the same basic design flaw that Boeing's MCAS has (allowing a single AoA sensor failure to cause the airplane to do unexpected and dangerous things), but unlike MCAS, it wasn't an ad hoc addition to deal with an issue in a redesign of an old airplane, it was designed into all Airbus fly-by-wire aircraft from the start.
You keep posting this, but it's simply not true- Qantas flight 72 did not experience an AoA sensor failure, and even if it had, the A330 uses all 3 independent AoA sensors and all 3 independent air data inertial reference units to command control movements.
The issue was caused by one of the ADIRU CPUs corrupting valid sensor data to produce a series of very specific spikes, hitting a specific edge case in the AoA cross-check logic that made the flight computer behave as if the erroneous data it was seeing was valid.
It's undoubtedly a serious design flaw, but it's not even remotely in the same ballpark as the Max's flagrant disregard for all process and well known design standards.
> a specific edge case in the AoA cross-check logic
What the article you linked to describes doesn't look quite like that to me. It looks like a design that does not use the "median of three values" method that the article says is used for "most" sensors (but not AoA). I agree, however, with your correction that it was not a direct AoA sensor failure such as occurred in the 737 Max incidents.
> It's undoubtedly a serious design flaw, but it's not even remotely in the same ballpark as the Max's flagrant disregard for all process and well known design standards.
It's not the same as MCAS in the sense that it's not an ad hoc addition to deal with an issue that arose in a redesign of an old airplane, true.
However, it is a case of (a) a flaw in an automated system causing the plane to automatically take an action that is unexpected and dangerous, instead of the automated system detecting the error; and (b) an automated system overriding the input of the human pilot in a case where the human pilot can plainly see that the automated system is doing something wrong.
Also, it illustrates a more general design philosophy with Airbus that has led to other incidents, which is to hide important information about what the automated system is doing from the pilots and limit their ability to interfere with its operation. The pilots have no direct readout of the AoA sensor values that the automated system is using, or indeed of most of its other inputs. It was also not clear to the pilots exactly what mode the automated system was in (they thought it was in Direct Law when it wasn't), and there was not a simple "stop the automation" button they could press to put the plane into a known manual mode with known behavior.
While I would agree that this is not the same specific failure mode as MCAS was with Boeing, I'm not sure it's not "remotely in the same ballpark" as far as long term implications are concerned.
As somebody who lives close to the Hamburg Airbus Factory and read a lot about the Boeing story: the regulators are more strict within the EU, and my feeling is the biggest mistake in the whole Boeing saga was to have them regulate themselves.
While there might be a economic benefit to not having to go the extra mile to get a regulators aproval, this can bite you really badly if you cannot uphold quality yourself any longer. And the interviews I heard wirh Boeing personel is nothing I ever heard even in personal exchanges with Airbus people. They surely also have their issues, bur to me it feels like a few magnitudes difference in severity.
So in short: underfunding the FAA isn’t doing you airplane manufacturers a favour in the long term. I know in the US people are usually anxious to give any job to the state, but regulating is actually one of the things they should do, and should do well
Airbus isn't focused on profit (cutting corners), it's focused on politics (i.e. providing jobs in different countries). Hopefully that would make (local) engineers more powerful...
The context of the reply is why Airbus would not encounter the same organizational faults as Boeing. The general consensus is that Boeing pursued profit over safety with respect to the MAX. & they did so by cutting corners.
I think it is fair to say that Boeing cut some corners which resulted in the current situation - but even Airbus surely only prioritises safety over profit to a point - and I'm also sure Airbus cuts some corners. And this is also not really clarifying why Airbus, a publicly listed company with shareholders, is not focused on profits.
I think what is being missed here is nuance - I don't think air-travel with 0 risk is possible - most things come with risk and if we are not willing to consider anything else nothing will ever get done.
There is being prudent and then there is being negligent - I think people conflate them. I don't think there is any publicly traded company that does not care about profit - Boeing is not somehow unique in this. If the profit is competently pursued then you won't jeopardise safety beyond a certain point though - because that will in the long term impact profits and shareholders who appoint execs are not benefited by reduction in long term profits and therefore the value of the company.
Airbus and Boeing are widely considered to be the one of most competitive and efficient duopolies on the planet. That might have a lot to do with the fact that they are based in two different large economies and cultures.
The nature of their products and customers, and the scale needed, may not lend itself to having a lot of smaller competitors. Where are the economies of scale (or other efficiencies) going to come from? This may already be reasonably optimal for large aircraft.
> America is going to pay for the cronyism that merged every airplane manufacturer into one and eliminated internal competition.
This is true, but the counterpoint is: America isn't going to pay very much for accidentally killing its last airliner manufacturer.
Airliners are a very mature market, with little incentive to innovate and minimal gains when you do. It's literally cheaper to operate 20 year old vehicles than replace them with the best available new ones! In how many other industries is that true?
And airliners are small: Airbus revenue is like $60B, Boeing (which also sees a lot of defense spending to pad the number) is $100B. No one else is even on the map. This is a tiny market, in a global sense. We're just stuck on the idea of it being important because of history: Airliners "feel like" a high tech growth industry of the future. They aren't. They're trains, basically.
The core devil's advocate position here is: so what? Boeing failed. Let them die (or rather, shrivel into the defense-only core of the company). Let the rest of the world fight over this tiny market with its shrinking margins. Nations that truly want to invent new things and grow in new ways[1] have better things to do and more important problems to worry about.
[1] Whether the USA still qualifies is sort of an open question, but for a different thread.
Their defense side is also seriously suffering. They've lost the vast majority of contracts in recent history and their main combat jet, the Super Hornet, was inherited in the McDonnell Douglas merger and continues to suffer under their management.
We pay for this all over the place and not just in planes. Look at it in communications, entertainment, social media. Stock price is valued as more important than choice for the consumer.
Eh, in the Bay Area we have plenty of public transportation agencies / systems (which all coordinate really poorly with each other), and none of them are great (though some are more cost-efficient than others, e.g. Caltrain vs. Bart).
None of them compete, effectively, since they’re in different coverage areas.
Except for bart, basically. And I certainly treat bart and MUNI as competitive products for commuting to work, although it doesn’t feel like MUNI does...
BART and MUNI have fundamentally different orientations, despite overlapping service along the Market Street subway.
BART's service is long-train (up to 10 cars) through service on fully dedicated trackways following a single through route within San Francisco. If you happen to be transiting any points between Colma and Embarcadero strickly along that route, BART is your best bet.
MUNI Metro serves multiple endpoints throughout San Francisco, several lines of which transit the upper level of the Market Street subway. Outside that route, the metro shares rights of way with street traffic, resulting in drastically less predictable schedules. The requirement to manage tight-radius curves and street traffic also limits the length of metro trainsets to a maximum of two coupled trolleys.
The results aren't pretty, for MUNI. But that's all but a given under the environment they're operating in.
>The results aren't pretty, for MUNI. But that's all but a given under the environment they're operating in.
Not necessarily. They could exclusively run fast 4 car trains along the length of the subway, with transfers to street lines. That would prevent a single street-level train from backing up the whole system. http://newmunimetro.com/m-market/
That's a possibility, though there's a long history of transit users prefering through routes rather than transfers. If Muni could maintain 4 minute headways (or shorter), consistently, in the subway, that might be an option. It would reduce the wait times inbound on the subway to an average of 2 minutes, which is tolerable.
You still end up with the service irregularities on the surface sections, unless those rights of way are dedicated. Something which really should have happened long ago on Geary and Irving/Judah, 3rd St., etc. Maybe with the dedicated transit route on Market the idea will spread.
Extending the subway further out is another option, though expensive and fairly unlikely.
But do they actually compete? Whenever I see privatized public transport it seems the systems cover different areas and in practice you either have only one real option or you have to pay for all options, neither of which leads to actual competition.
My understanding is in Tokyo they compete a little - that is there are a few people who are within walking distance to two different private operators. However even there most people are only really within talking distance of one line.
With land based transit competition it is really hard to compete because land within walking distance is finite. (if you don't demand walking distance you get less riders by a lot). Thus to have real competition you need to have extremely high density - 50 story apartment buildings with few parks or other open space, at that point one line cannot handle all the riders and a second line can compete.
I think the MTAs woes are unique to the MTA/management of the MTA and not lack of competition. Paris and Madrid have no problem building and operating trains at reasonable costs even though they also operate with no competition.
I'd argue the problem is endemic to large stationary organizations, but some do a better job than others at keeping it at bay.
It's interesting to wonder why. I think one aspect is the degree to which politically powerful are willing to fight it. Famously Stalin actually cared that the Moscow metro worked well, and it did, in a country otherwise crippled by complacent behemoths.
Perhaps the Parisian elite likewise take more pride in having a metro which works OK, are willing to spend more political capital fighting for it. They feel some obligation to keep up with Brussels & Berlin, perhaps that substitutes for competition?
I would kill for second avenue subway in 99% of America. It only sucks in Manhattan. MTA is the worst, except it’s also the best mass transit in the country.
If we could build subways for about of half the current low price by world standards (Spain or Turkey) cost most cities would have subways. However since New York "insists" on paying about 7x what Spain would for the same amount of subway it is just barely worth it to build the SAS, and anything with even slightly less ridership potential is a waste of money.
I have seen a lot of explanations of why the US pays so much more - they tend to not hold up. Note that last time congress asked the question the bill did not allow examining non-US construction for the report - something to write your congressman about.
> However since New York "insists" on paying about 7x what Spain would for the same amount of subway it is just barely worth it to build the SAS, and anything with even slightly less ridership potential is a waste of money.
Literally any amount spent on the subway will be returned in rent to landlords. You're just looking from the wrong perspective.
Not sure why you're downvoted. MTA basically has a license to print money. Their expenses keep growing while the service keeps deteriorating and fares increasing. They are very poorly managed and awarded the contract with no competition. The MTA has become too big to fail.
> Stock price is valued as more important than choice for the consumer.
By who? And why should those that value it more than choice for the consumer value choice for the consumer more? And how would they even go about doing that?
If you have cash to speculate, liquidate now- American market is going to take a dip in January with Boeing, which will be a good opportunity to re-invest.
In what sense? I work with a lot of Aerospace, Transportion and Logistics companies and I've personally seen tens of hundreds of companies that are suppliers for Boeing/Airbus. What do you think GE, United Technologies, Rolls Royce Aerospace, etc. all do?
Yes, there are hundreds of other manufacturers and many moving parts, which reminded me of SpaceX.
One of the reason SpaceX has been abled to save so much cost was that they made / design all the parts themselves, truly vertically integrated. And this has led to better design, lower cost, higher level of knowledge in every part of the system, and more innovation.
I remember there were so regulation that forbid AirCraft manufactures to do that, what was the rationale behind it?
I thought the example of SpaceX was quit well known [1], and the reason why SpaceX Rocket in itself, excluding the cost reduction of reusable luncher were much lower.
There were also numerous article and Interview from Elon Musk himself confirming that.
> Because SpaceX is a private company, it has not divulged the secret to its pricing.
?
> There were also numerous article and Interview from Elon Musk himself confirming that.
Do you honestly believe everything Musk says? He has a history of embellishing the truth.
I'm not saying SpaceX isn't vertically integrated, I just find claims surrounding anything Musk says dubious unless it's confirmed by 3rd party reporters.
They're far too horizontally integrated. Reducing vertical integration is part of their quality problem resulting from adopting black-box management, see:
but it may also mean far less chance to innovate production practice.
If vertical integration is always good, the ideal situation is a single producer for any kind of product and no suppliers, which doesn't seem to work too well either.
Efficiency and security are always traded for one another. Unfortunately, markets will tend to the short term benefits so the pendulum will swing towards efficiency until it’s gone too far and something causes it to swing back.
Up to a point. But when you get to the point that an industry is so vertically integrated that only one entity can viably compete, you have a monopoly.
There's no monopoly here, there's a duopoly. Airbus and Boeing are in fierce competition with each other. On top of that, the Chinese are entering the fray too.
Efficient market theory would suggest that there is no margin in equilibrium, and what looks like margin is actually the cost of capital (which all companies, big and small, have to pay).
That's incorrect - you would only expect no "margin" in a perfectly competitive market, which obviously isn't the case in the market for airliners.
In markets where firms have market power, there is an explicit and well-studied phenomenon known as "double marginalization"[1][2], which is what the parent comment is describing. Vertical integration is one possible solution to this problem, although there are other approaches as well.
Double marginalization also occurs elsewhere in the air travel industry. Imagine I flew on American Airlines from Charlotte to London, and then continued on British Airways from London to Lyon. If both airlines set their prices independently, then they would both add a markup, and the combined price of the itinerary would be higher than the profit-maximizing price that a single airline would set. In this situation, antitrust authorities will often allow the airlines to form a joint venture and coordinate on price-setting. This reduces horizontal competition (because e.g. AA and BA are no longer competing with one another for passengers on JFK-LHR), but can provide consumer benefits if eliminating double marginalization allows airlines to set their prices lower on multi-airline itineraries.
That's too broad a statement. There are some theories in economics that work very well, like supply and demand, or arbitrage theory. The idea of the cost of capital is also a fairly well-trodden one, it is taught in business courses, used on wallstreet, and seems to work in practice.
I can't think of a single broad economic axiom or theory that doesn't depend—wholly or in-part—on the principle of ceteris paribus, which excludes their practical application to essentially everything in real life.
In a few cases, economic theories do a passable job of roughly mirroring real-world behavior, but that's the exception and not the rule.
>on the principle of ceteris paribus, which excludes their practical application to essentially everything in real life.
When a principle is violated marginally, conclusions made based on the principle are themselves violated marginally. You can't write off chemistry because relativistic effects violate the conservation of mass any more than you can write off economics because no two soup cans are identical.
>If you break both of them up too much, they may be unable to compete against a major Chinese manufacturer when it scales up.
This is a crucial point that so many people seem to miss. If you want to break up these companies (manufacturers, banks), they are going to get absolutely crushed in the global economy, competing against Chinese state-sponsored companies.
In the game theory of open global commerce, it pays to cheat.
The other is to force investment (either from them or through government) to a third vendor. Bombardier and Honda seem really interested in entering the space, and maybe Dassault can be dragged into it, but its capital intensive.
The Boeing 787 battery issues shows exactly that they're vertically dis-integrated to the maximum extent possible. So what you're saying is the completely opposite of the truth.
I don't think cronyism is any less of a problem for Airbus than it is for Boeing. Boeing happens to have had a recent bad incident that got it a lot of negative PR. But Airbus has had past incidents due to design flaws that are just as shocking.
It's not just the airframe OEMs, but the entire supply base of aerospace manufactures has been going through a consolidation. Look at Rockwell Collins and Safran. But it's not all bad, most of this consolidation will lead to new opportunities for new suppliers.
Hmm, not so sure, it a global habit and for each country that does it, then it goes international. Lots of other countries merge their major manufacturers, or allow them to, then - being 5x larger - find themselves powerless to avoid being bought out by their American cousins.
Has happened to countless engineering, manufacturing, chemical and tech here in Europe. I suspect it would already have happened with most of the last remaining defence players were they not defence players.
We're starting to see similar now China has risen as far as they have. Real competition is really, really unpopular in today's world.
