Saudi airline cancels $6B Boeing order in favor of Airbus
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
The Paris air show wasn't good for Boeing either.
IE. Potential customers are asked to announce their orders at the air show for prestige of both the buyer and seller
There are people with delegated authorities that function outside the branding of their country. What a concept
an English copy of a law where power is explicitly delegated to the minister of finance? rule of law isn't that strong or consistently applied there, but it is a distributed system just like federal or confederated relationships with regional governments. There are 13 semi-autonomous states in Saudi Arabia with appointed governors, with a mix of appointed and elected representatives.
The royal family is consulted for laws, but the royal family is 7,000+ people. The King doesn't have to do anything, and just can make executive choices over any matter whenever he wants if things diverge from their brand, their society and their interpretation of the Quran.
When was the last time the murder of a US resident on foreign soil investigated and/or prosecuted by the US?
Any kind of freezing foreign assets would cause a plummet in foreign buyers, a plummet in house prices, and possibly a recession...
It’s too bad there isn’t a better whistleblowing mechanism for these kinds of questionable design decisions for critical infrastructure.
I can only hope the certification process will become more rigorous and require the approval of multiple aviation regulators before it’s declared airworthy.
if that happens to be real case, it may become the textbook case of perverted metrics/cobra effect.
All it takes is someone from the FAA to read it and think about it and act on it. That is the role of the FAA.
Now, if it wasn't on the design, then you may say Boeing is mainly to blame. If it was documented, but not rejected, then the FAA is mainly at fault.
Ultimately though, the FAA has the responsibility.
I can't speak for pilots but as a passenger, I've been in an a319 that had enough pressure issues to give me sharp pain in my ears that lingered for a day, and annecdotally they feel more prone to turbulence with their big wings.
I'm too tall for either of their seats, so perhaps that's why I don't notice the comfort you speak of.
Do you have a citation for that? I've heard anecdotal stuff in both directions.
Really it’s not just different aircraft but also different design philosophies.
"Pilots prefer Airbus" is a pretty big assertion, and not one that can be proven by "some pilots on YouTube say so".
Except that their controls also allow faulty AOA sensor data to drive incorrect automated actions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
The really unbelievable part of this one is that, unlike the 737 MAX, Airbus aircraft actually have 3 AOA sensors, so it would be simple for them to use the obvious "two out of three rule" to detect and ignore faulty sensor data. But instead they allow one faulty AOA sensor to trigger uncommanded pitch down events.
The new A320ies are nicer at base setup, than 737. Though not by much. A320 has a larger range of offerings(A321 and A319). And there's no comparison for a passenger when flying 4+ hours, because 737 is just too small. (I get annoyed even remembering my flight from NY to Belfast on 737)
There's one aspect that instructors note - 737 is more manual and thus can be pushed closer to the edge, as a result the landing can be shorter on 737. Airbus is much more automated, making landings much gentler abeit slightly longer.
They were slated to take the 737MAX deliveries starting in 2021 and with deliveries currently halted, there is no way that will happen (especially if the airplane isn't cleared soon). Flyadeal is trying to grow and they need planes to do it. Airbus can deliver on the 2021 date without issue and Flyadeal was likely given a slight discount to pick up some empty production slots.
HN's record on such predictions is notorious anyway.
Facebook didn't fail, despite all the HN predictions and bad outcome fantasy posts. Quite the opposite. Its user base keeps expanding, its sales keep climbing, its power keeps growing. Users did not abandon it en masse. None of what was commonly predicted on HN occurred.
Intel - another common target of bad outcome fantasies - isn't failing, their profits are at all-time highs. That's despite the constant HN posts for years about that being inevitable. AMD is due to crush them any minute now, Intel is toast.
Boeing is a $200 billion valuation company - which earned $10b in profit last year - that is strategically critical to the world's largest economy and sole superpower (the one that also happens to have a $750 billion military that depends on Boeing). It's a company with one of the grandest, longest and most positive histories in all of aviation. The notion that two crashes should end that is absurd.
Boeing isn't going anywhere, not under any circumstances most likely. As things actually are, over many decades it has earned its place. If any company deserves an opportunity to re-earn trust, Boeing would qualify.
This part is really all that matters. Boeing isn't a company as much as it's an organ of the state. Regardless of how inferior their engineering is, they won't be allowed to fail.
What I would prefer, is that Boeing's stock got hit harder for this screwup. It's been down a very small amount. A stop in share price would hit the management hard enough to get their safety inspections up to the task.
- go bankrupt faster than anything
- EU won't let them operate within the EU
- The USA won't let them operate within the USA
Totally reminds me of exploding Samsung phones in terms of the small incremental investment that would have saved billions.
If I was to guess, there's a ton of this kind of stuff going on, and most of the time nothing happens. Not all boneheaded or sketchy engineering decisions cause catastrophe (or get caught). Also, my understanding is that this was a deliberate choice by Boeing, so more "safety engineers" wouldn't necessarily help. This is frequently the case with engineering disasters. The problems are with politics, management, even communication.
Boeing is not integrated like SpaceX
Granted, the -MAX8's problem seems to stem from the need to race Airbus to the market and not having the time to do proper integration tests, but the difficulty with testing is directly related to complications in this development model.
Also, Boeing is way overdue for a proper 737 replacement. A 737 sized bird using 787 design principles/technology and built to properly handle the massive engines that modern customers crave.
They should definitely make that! They could call it the...737 MAXIMUM SIZE. Or maybe the 7373 MAX for short?
It's more like long range planning with commitments as defined by airlines 10 year plans. They __don't__ want the planes now like a backlog would imply, they want them in 2021.
Also, schedules tend to align with the cycle of the industry. New planes take time to develop etc. So everything happens on a year(s) schedule, incl delivery schedules.
>Is it not viable to scale up production
And then what are you gonna do with all that infrastructure sitting idle for 8 years in between your aircraft generations? Sometimes slow is the profitable approach
The 737 (all variants) is/was/will be massively popular so I'd imagine as a project it's probably still profitable.
The danger here is reputation. Boeing has in the space of a year ruined a multi-decade reputation. I mentioned this before, but all these articles scream underlying institutional culture problems. Remember the one a month or so ago about a Boeing engineer saying he's uncomfortable letting family fly on a Boeing plane? Forget a lost order, that's existential crisis territory for an organization.
Well, that's not 100% accurate.
Airlines always want the most fuel-efficient plane now, but will settle for ASAP. With leasing, they can dump their old planes and lease new models.
That's why the Singapore A380s were chopped up this year - they were heavy and thus not fuel efficient.
The DC-1/DC-2 was developed for TWA because Boeing promised their entire 247 production run to United.
It's better for Boeing to sell 400 737s a year every year for ten years, than 800 a year for two years, then 300 a year for the next eight years.
Most of these contracts have an initial deposit then payment on delivery however if the order is cancelled, Boeing keeps any deposit and possibly some or all of the full payment (as a cancellation fee like with most cell phone contracts).
Now Bowing already has the initial cost of manufacturing partially or fully covered AND gets to sell the plane or simply not manufacture it for pure profit.
Boeing isn't going to profit off these cancellations in any case.
There's a lot of money in support as well.
Now I'm suspicious of all 737/787 flights. Thank goodness it's easy these days to figure out what kind of aircraft you're booking.
I wonder when sites like Kayak will add a toggle so you can include/exclude certain models of aircraft from your itinerary.
What's certain is that all airlines dream of having only one manufacturer. If they have multiple, they often try to make one hub service one type of plane, e.g. fly all their Airbuses past one airport and all their Boeings past another (For competing models such as A320 vs 737)
A good idea even when all planes are the same manufacturer is probably to not have all planes being the same model so they all get grounded in case of a discovery (An NG 737 is not the same as an older one which is not the same as a MAX etc)
If anything, what I'll try to avoid is dodgy airlines, not dodgy planes (at least not ones from Boeing and Airbus). Most of the airlines I'll keep avoiding operate in places I likely won't fly anyway - such as some domestic russian flights.
It's not likely Boeing is going out of business. Is the purpose of articles like this to effect a wall street trader? Not into that personally, just wondering. Why is NBC putting pressure on Boeing? For the clicks?
It's one of the cases where screwing up your product has consequences, even for a huge nation-state-backed duopolist. That happens so rarely it's newsworthy.