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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

And we got the 737 Max out of it. If we continue to protect Boeing from competition, they'll continue to do this.

I think you misunderstand. We got the 737 Max because of competition from Airbus in the form of the A320neo series - otherwise Boeing would have taken a few more years and made a clean-sheet design.

EDIT: I'm not saying the 737 Max issues are Airbus's fault. I'm saying that the existence of competition is why we ended up with the quick&dirty stopgap solution instead of a better solution further in the future.

OR: Boeing went through the a series of merger consolidations in aerospace that effectively destroyed their engineering culture, blew up their competition, monopolized their markets, and removed the need to innovate and then when they got caught on their ass by Airbus they made a half-baked airplane that killed hundreds of people.

See: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

Or: Boeing is in a spiral to death, involving bigger-than-themselves trends:

- Airbus started later, so they started with newer technology, on top of it the fly-by-wire / all electronics commands. Boeing is weighted by its legacy. Dozens of thousands of pilots have been trained on mechanical systems, it’s hard to migrate them. Airbus benefited from watching Boeing’s experience and starting at the age of electronics.

- Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas in the 2000’s which has extremely bad engineering records (Half of episodes of Air Crash Investigation are about the DC-9/DC-10/MD-11, involving FAA leniency on the flying doors, FAA leniency on extending the length without doing the proper engineering, and I don’t know if one sees a ressemblance with current events). So the MD acquisition may have entirely modified Boeing’s middle management approach to « handling FAA ». By negotiating FAA’s leniency, or by having people exchange jobs and offices...

- Since the MD purchase 20 years ago, Boeing has chosen to collude with FAA to become the certifier instead of the FAA, in order to win competition against Airbus. Unfortunately it has eroded customer trust when we noticed the FAA isn’t doing its job at all, for example about the metal frames where workers had to drill extra holes next to misplaced ones, or bend the frames, compromising structural integrity entirely [1], the batteries or the MCAS.

- Now with 200 aircrafts 737 Max grounded since 6 months, and perhaps in need of being thrown away entirely, although Boeing isn’t paying directly, it’s still a very good solid stable reason on the long term for customers to choose... not them.

So Boeing had an incumbent, and played the card of « Let’s bypass the safety process and see whether we recover our advance ». It can’t bankrupt because it’s financially as engineered as a subprime, and a governmental strategic asset, but its future isn’t bright.

[1] https://youtu.be/IaWdEtANi-0

The scary thing is Boeing has zero incentive to work differently. The US government will bail them out if push comes to shove because they are the only major domestic commercial airline manufacturer left.

It's a really fubar situation.

Only now do we start to get a glimmer of why multiple mergers in aerospace was probably a bad idea, and anti-competitive. But the U.S. political class gets a lot of money supporting mergers.

Let this be noted in other markets where we're told that 2-3 players are plenty of competition (looking at you, telecom). If any one company is too big to fail because there's not enough competition left, there's already not enough competition.

Airbus was a merger of smaller, individually uncompetitive manufacturers. Worked out ok for Europe.

I’m sorry can you detail?

I thought Airbus started with the Concorde, the project of UE willing to do something industrial and inspiring together to increase our pride, interdependence and more interestingly our engineering skills. The Concord itself failed as a market but the skills/organizations we developed resulted in Airbus/EADS and their civil planes, in which the acquisition of smaller companies was a mere tool participating to a grand scheme decided by Europe.

Are you suggesting that this storytelling is rather reversed, and that Airbus was the result of a natural, organic merge of several companies?

I'm not an Airbus historian but a quick scan of the Wikipedia page[1] suggests that at least some of your understanding is incorrect.

As far as I can tell Airbus started as a consortium of European aerospace manufacturers to allow them to compete with US manufacturers. Several of the cooperating companies that became Airbus such as VFW-Fokker and Aérospatiale were themselves the result of mergers.

The history of mergers at Airbus doesn't look much different from that of Boeing. Concorde was one of the first designs but Airbus was not created specifically to build it. It appears Airbus was instead created to build what the industry called an "airbus" which seems to mean "airliner".

> Are you suggesting that this storytelling is rather reversed, and that Airbus was the result of a natural, organic merge of several companies?

Yes, it appears that Airbus is the result of a natural, organic merge of several companies. Over many years and many layers.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Airbus#Origins

Somehow your comment reads as if the crashes were Airbus' and not Boeing's fault. Or am I missing something here?

Above comment isn't putting blame on Airbus, it's objecting to the statement that competition would have prevented the 737Max, and challenges that competition was the reason the 737Max was made.

I suppose it could be read that way, but my take on it was that competition doesn't always product the optimal outcome.

Or the existence of Boeing sitting on its laurels, and not having a plan to build a new 737, or its replacement, before the neo appeared. It's not only the case Boeing needed to react with quick & dirty. They could have been pro-active. Arguably they didn't because they're not adequately competitive. And they went with the stop gap also because they're inadequately competitive. Short cuts at every turn.

This, many people here think competition is the cleanest way to the top. It’s not, and this is why we have regulations.

you must be kidding! So now not only we have to give money to Boeing, but also be happy with the terrible products they create? If they can't compete, them they shouldn't be in business at all.

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