United orders 50 new Airbus long-range jets to replace Boeing 757s
reuters.com
reuters.com
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?
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.
The KC46 is being fielded by the US and a few nations that the US traditionally use the same arms.
The A330 is fielded by the UK, a couple commonwealth nations and KSA
Total number built is in the 30s for both.
* https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29933/air-force-says-i...
* https://www.aerotime.aero/clement.charpentreau/24184-no-fix-...
The 787 is the newest airframe and it's fine. The 737 is the Windows XP of the sky and there's only so much you can fix with service packs.
How about the KC-46 and 777X?
Their product and their brand are worse than bad, but they make a lot of money.
Yes, I agree the 50 year old design seems to have reached its end of life.
- 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.
... though from the same era, there is this for Boeing which seems much worse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
Or this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It's not that European companies get the kid glove treatment if they violate the law.
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
https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/suspicions-of-...
Why would you say that?
> profit (cutting corners)
Is profit the same as cutting corners?
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.
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?
So the EU's "vaunted" adversarial regulator actually was doing a much worse job than the FAA.
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.
[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...
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 :(
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
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_marginalization
[2] https://mru.org/courses/development-economics/double-margina...
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.
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.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2011/02/04/2014130646...
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?
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?
Do you have a source for that? Even Tesla isn't really that vertically integrated (for example - its Gigafactory is a JV with Panasonic).
There were also numerous article and Interview from Elon Musk himself confirming that.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-spacex-reinvented-rock...
> 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.
You really have to be ignorant about that industry to say that.
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.
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'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.
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/
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.
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.
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 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.
Literally any amount spent on the subway will be returned in rent to landlords. You're just looking from the wrong perspective.
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?
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.
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.
Look at the sales figured for the 757 - sales were either flat or very slow from 2001 onward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_757#Orders_and_deliveri...
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.
They tried with the 787-3 and that simply didn't sell.
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.
Something is missing from your argument.
The US will move to lock Airbus and China out of its massive, wildly profitable domestic airline market through protectionism. Which is exactly what China is guaranteed to do, either directly or indirectly, as it pushes its own airplane manufacturing efforts to the forefront in the pursuit of its economic self-interest.
How many Soviet-made jet planes did the US buy from 1950 to 1990?
The difference now with that China is that though some would say that China is capitalist in name only (and they wouldn't be completely inaccurate) it is part of the WTO and thus part of the global capitalist system to some extent. Consider for a moment that exports account for a greater % of its GDP than does the US.
Arguably China is much more like Japan of the 80s and Korea of the 90s than the soviets of the 50s.
Now, if you look at the parts going into the Comac C919, a huge proportion of the parts are non-Chinese: https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2092656/chin...
Basically the tail, wings, radar cover, fuselage, interior, and assembly is Chinese – everything else is US and EU. (The C929 being co-developed with Russia has a greater percentage of parts home-made – this is exactly how China is ramping up its aircraft carrier development, methodically and incrementally bringing more and more expertise onshore).
Buying the C919 when it hits mass production will be like buying a very familiar but cheaper Airbus or Boeing equivalent. Neither Japan nor Korea nor Russia have ever managed to pull this off.
Who knows what will happen. Time will tell. Looking to the Soviet past is not a good indicator of what is coming down the pike imho.
In addition the US and EU may short-sightedly try to protect their aircraft manufacturers but US+EU are less than 45% of world GDP. Plenty of people will be perfectly satisfied with a Chinese plane when their only choices are all foreign manufacturers.
* This isn't to say I want to be first -- I typically wait a few years before flying with a new model, though it's hardly a perfect heuristic: I had no idea the 737-Max wasn't really just another 737.
China already de-facto does this in almost every market, so there's nothing new here, really.
It'd be nice to have WTO rules actually followed, but I don't think it will be this way.
I don’t see how the west wins this one
Boeing themselves values the Chinese commercial aircraft market at $3T and 8,000 aircraft over over 20 years.
Of that 6,000 are single-aisle (737, A320, C919).
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/boeing-says-china-needs-to-s...
Once its certified, they will instruct their companies to buy the C919 in the thousands.
The J-20 has appeared (and flied and demonstrated its weapon bay) on multiple public air shows where foreign medias were invited. I believe they also have a few squadrons in service already.
There is no reason for the USA to block out Comac if they are flying with Pratt&Whitney or GE/CMF engines or Honeywell flight controls.
Eh, the Chinese aren't a threat despite what McNerney thought. If nothing else the C919 isn't Comac's first attempt at an airliner, the ARJ21 was.
Airliners are extremely complex. Take a look at Mitsubishi. They've got experience building planes, turbines, etc. Yet Mitsubishi is still struggling with the MRJ, in large part because the MRJ is the first Japanese built airliner in an extraordinarily long time. As for the Chinese, McDonnell-Douglas sold tooling to the SAIC (now Comac) so that they could build licensed MD-80s (some of which are flying in the US). The tooling was eventually used to develop the ARJ21 and Comac still couldn't make it work well. There are a few ARJs flying in China, but even the domestic airlines don't want them. The Canadians tried their hand at a modern airliner with the C-series, and that pretty much bankrupted Bombardier.
China could really be set up to take a lot of commercial aircraft market share over the coming decades.
Even if (or when) Comac were magically able to produce a competitive airliner, there's more to selling planes than just building them. Support is a huge issue. The Russians have significant experience successfully building airliners and yet even with western turbofans Sukhoi couldn't find a market for their SuperJet. They sold a few to the Belgians and the Mexicans but those have largely stopped flying. Why? There's no support. Boeing and Airbus have huge support networks all over the globe. Comac has absolutely nothing like this in the works or in place.
How so? They can't put tariffs on foreign planes purchased by foreign airlines, and most of the airlines in the world are not American.
"The World Trade Organization said on Thursday the United States had ignored its request to halt a subsidized tax break for Boeing Co in its main plane-making state of Washington as a 15-year-old transatlantic trade row edges towards tit-for-tat sanctions."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-usa-aircraft-wto/wto-s...
At least in China, the government is the one that has the final say on everything, and the state-owned corporations have to do what the government wants. Here, the corporations get to do what they want, but they still get subsidies from the government but without being required to operate in the interests of the government or the nation at large.
According to their most recent 10-K, the Defense, Space, and Security business unit represents about 23% of Boeing's revenue and 13% of their profit. Some portion of the Global Services revenue comes from government contracts as well, though, so the true contribution is higher.
https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=12927&acc...
Weirdly enough, most of Air France & KLM fleet are comprised of Boeing planes
Are you sure about that? On WP I see 79 Boeing out of 223 planes for Airbus, but I’m not expert. Is there any wider fleet to consider? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France
KLM has 13 Airbus out of 123 airframes, that part is correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM
HOP is mostly Bombardier/Embraer, etc.
In terms of the aircraft group, Boeing has steadily growing 787 orders and deliveries, with about 500 orders yet to deliver.
In terms of their space program, they are close to testing their manned capsule and just got a light touch program review, while SpaceX got put through the ringer.
And there are other aspects to Boeing that I'm not familiar with, but I'm sure don't relate directly to the 737 MAX.
As for Airbus, they have had to kill their A380 program, seemingly prematurely, in the face of declining interesting and cancelled orders. So, it's not all roses on the other side of the pond either.
I'm sure this will end well for them...
Boeing will not be allowed to fail, even if it personally bankrupts every taxpayer in the United States. And they know it.
Is this a reference to the Organizational Safety Assessments NASA announced in response to Elon Musk smoking pot on a livestream online?
I don't think that's a program review - more of a "are spacex employees smoking pot at work review."
If not, could you link to some info on the reviews you are referencing?
The biggest issue for Boeing is that the MAX sold about 5,000 frames vs 7,000 for the A320NEO, going from a 50%/50% market shares (737NG vs A320) down to 40%/60% market shares (737MAX vs A320NEO). On the other hand the A320 is practically sold out for the next decade (Airbus is aiming at a production of 750/year, and that's quite a challenge), so the ratio is unlikely to move much.
They increased their dividend which will also support a higher share prices, but again this can only continue for a finte period.
And as another poster mentioned: Military contracts.
2. Even including the problems with the 737 max, Boeing has an exceptionally good safety record.
3. Regulatory capture of the FAA by Boeing is bad news for consumers, but not necessarily for shareholders.
4. Investing in aircraft manufacturers during a growing economy is reasonable and Boeing is one of only two airplane manufacturers positioned to take advantage of the trend.
I won't miss the 737. What I'd love to see is a twin-aisle-but-small short range aircraft. Yeah, that won't happen, but it would be comfy.
Just the higher ceiling height on double-aisle aircraft make the trip so much less claustrophobic, and the double aisles mean that you aren't essentially held hostage until the service cart rolls by.
The 757 is an old, loud, design and loading/unloading it took forever, all the while you had cramped overhead bins. It wasn't often I could avoid the 757 when going to SF, but if I had any option, I would avoid it. Literally any other plane in service is a more pleasant experience. I always thought it was somewhat ironic that United chose the oldest plane in any major airline's fleet to fly between two tech hubs- those 757s were also pretty much the last to get wifi onboard as well.
The topic of 757s trigger me a bit :)
But it will happen in our lifetime.
Delta has already bought a bunch and I look forward to these planes becoming more and more common.
Obligatory Wendover Productions video on the A220 and the fight with Boeing
Cabin config is of course airline dependent but in one of the default configurations the A220 middle seat is actually wider than the flanking seats. In a world no one cares about customer comfort this is a nice reversal.
As a frequent flyer customer I find comfort has much more to do with aircraft than cabin service: I flew 2 United segments in the past few days on 737 equipment. United flight attendants are the highest paid among US airlines but United doesn’t spend enough money on ops. Aircrafts had so many technical issues and both segments were heavily delayed and very uncomfortable. No amount of customer service would have helped.
They also missed completion and delivery of air-frames on contracts with regional airlines. And other signs of "we messed up" on a project.
There seemed to be lots of complaints at the time (on Canadian forums and news-stories) about how the family that owns Bombardier would have been fired as C-levels in a public company based on this fiasco.
OTOH, I haven't heard anything about this in a long time.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_New_Midsize_Airplane
The A321 (and the 757) is a lot more flexible, can carry more cargo, and has better performance.
Maybe the concept of the MAX being a replacement was valid but, based on Boeing’s blundering development of the plane, can you really fault anyone for avoiding it?
Will the MAX fly again? Will it crash again? Will passengers trust it again?
Too many unknown questions make it hard to plan ahead.
Last year I took 73 flights. At least three of those were on a MAX. I profusely refuse to get on one of those, regardless if they are fixed or not.
Maybe I'm just blissfully ignorant to how bad all the planes in the air are... but I feel like pilots would be screaming bloody murder if they were all as bad as the MAX.
This is not the problem. The aircraft's performance is within the bounds of "perfectly acceptable for what it is" but it is too different from the existing 737s in a particular area. If the portion of the MCAS that handles this particular area were just turned off the MAX would fly fine but it wouldn't be close enough to a 737 for anyone to say with a straight face that pilots can fly without retraining. This need for pilot compatibility lead to a faulty implementation of MCAS of which flies the plane into the ground in certain conditions.
Also there is a train to most airports to avoid taking a car.
I suspect this is going to change as booking web sites can use that feature as a selling point.
Here in Australia just recently I booked a flight for mid December and was very surprised to see the type of aircraft listed on the bookings page.
Now that I have seen this information, I myself will be expecting to see this information and will happily change booking sites if required.
> I suspect this is going to change as booking web sites can use that feature as a selling point.
I hope you are right. Google flights might add a filter. But will Southwest add it to their own site?
Big carriers have a mix - United, American Airlines, Lufthansa, Air France, Turkish Airlines, Korean Airlines, British Airways, etc.
About a decade?! I was on one of their 757s returning to Dublin a while ago; it felt like they were already pushing the end of its lifespan. I suppose the repair of the interior doesn’t say much about the airframe...
Planes can essentially fly indefinitely if you're willing to put money into ongoing maintenance. For instance some B-52s will have served for roughly 100 years by the time they are retired.
1. Improved video conferencing quality and availability
2. potential future green initiatives - like adding tax to air fuel or frequent flyer taxes.
Sure people will still want to travel, but might do less.
That is unless we get a steep carbon tax. Hopefully we will.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-much-rev...
I think that video conferencing and collaboration technologies have already curtailed business travel, the most profitable part of the airline business.
The high volume in terms of passenger numbers is dominated by leisure travel. Video conferencing is unlikely to affect this (although the family did a Hangout at Thanksgiving), but it might be affected by stronger environmental campaigns or by a significant economic downturn. In fact, I think an economic downturn could cause a fairly steep drop in leisure air travel.
And they're more profitable for reasons not relating to class of seat.
My personal view, (from the luxury of Business, now moving back south as I cease work travel) is that seat pitch, seat size, and seat density should be regulated. That removes competitive tension around "who suffers more for price" but at a socialized cost of travel costs more than bucket seat prices. I know thats anti-democratising in the specifics of who now will be able to afford routine travel, but the cram-them-in approach has got beyond acceptable.
Also people are different proportions - length v body, top versus bottom part of leg etc.
You might also deprive diminutive people one of their few perks - cheap and comfortable air travel :-)
So if it became relatively more expensive for lots of people, the trend might well go the other way....
We need a way more laws like this :)
I'll start with 3 off the top of my head.
1) You can't both make content and distribute content commercially
2) (More abstractly) You can't both make a platform and compete with sellers and resellers on that platform
3) You can't both make a mass or social media product and allow advertisers' concerns to dictate content
They're a bit sketchy but you get where I'm coming from I hope?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2011/02/04/2014130646...
It offers a detailed look at Douglas Aircraft and their doomed attempt to boost profits via outsourcing.
Those familiar with the commercial aviation business know that Boeing's "purchase" of McDonnell-Douglas resulted in wholesale importation of Douglas's accounting wizardry to what had been a largely engineering- and safety-driven corporate culture.
Relevance to the MAX fiasco and the tardiness of Boeing's NMA designs is left as an exercise to the reader…
Might make entry into otherwise moaty markets like aerospace a bit easier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology
However, from my experience, it's still nowhere near the level of polish that e.g. Solidworks has, so professional work is still primarily done with non-Free tools.
I have no direct information, but I'd imagine the big aerospace companies have significant proprietary internal tooling, specialized to their own work flows and IP.
Right, but for mechanical CAD it's heavily based on Catia. The customization is more on the PLM side.
Low cost airlines dominate because people people want to pay as little as possible for flights.
I assume they don't increase production (or at least not enough to massively reduce this backlog) because they don't expect this to keep up, and it's a massive investment.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_New_Midsize_Airplane
People buy airplane for safety first, nobody dares to buy them no matter how cheap they are if they will end up killing people on board.