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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Foreign aircraft purchases are highly politicized and this decision probably has nothing to do with product quality, safety, or price. More likely it's a signal from the Saudi royal family to the US Congress that they ought to stop being so critical over minor issues like the murder of a US resident or bombing civilian targets in Yemen.

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It's say it's more likely related to a recent sale of arms and planes to Qatar, who are in their bad books https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-10/qatar-donald-trump...

Or maybe they just don't want to buy aircrafts that crash.

The Paris air show wasn't good for Boeing either.

Boeing crashed at the Paris air show?

Metaphorically. On the first day airbus got about 100 orders and Boeing got none.

I assume all those orders are pre-planned though.

IE. Potential customers are asked to announce their orders at the air show for prestige of both the buyer and seller

While I don't doubt that could have had some impact, somehow if Boeing's 737Max had no ongoing safety investigations I don't think this deal would have been canceled.

Exactly. My first thought, "OK, so can we whine and bash Airbus now for doing business with Saudi Arabia like we'd been doing to other companies?"

If they're civilian planes, what's the problem?

Is EU any less critical of Saudis?

UK/EU tend not to criticise the Saudis because we sell them billions of GBP of arms+support on a regular basis. They also have us by the balls with oil, and they're buying up a lot of London. That means we're not really in a position to criticise.

The fact that they buy up a lot of London creates leverage for the UK over the Saudis, not vice versa

Do explain...

Any kind of freezing foreign assets would cause a plummet in foreign buyers, a plummet in house prices, and possibly a recession...

A plummet in house prices may be exactly what London needs

Saudi government isn't a monolith.

There are people with delegated authorities that function outside the branding of their country. What a concept

this seems completely false. it is a monolith. in fact a monarchy. do you have any support for your claim?

what support would you like?

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.

Didn't MBS lock up a bunch of "tribal leaders" (for lack of a better word) in this luxury hotel and made them kowtow to him? Not sure I would characterize that as a federation of peers being consulted.

> like the murder of a US resident

When was the last time the murder of a US resident on foreign soil investigated and/or prosecuted by the US?

When was the last time one was murdered in an embassy?

i think the point he's making is "resident" not "citizen".

In the US embassy? Never, I would hope.

That product quality, safety and price are all superior with Airbus right now is a bonus.

Just how connected to the royal family is "Flyadeal"? This doesn't look like a very large airline, it's a smaller low-cost one, and this order was for only 30 planes. The article even says one big reason they were able to make this move is because of the small size of the order.

It is owned by Saudia, which is owned by the government.

Really? Or was it about the recent sales to UAE?

That might have also been a factor. They'll never openly state the real reason so we can only guess.

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