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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

Boeing unfortunately has to be bailed out, if we as a world want airplane as a method of transportation. It’s only Boeing and Airbus, there are no others.

Management should be punished excessively as a warning to others, though I do not expect them to be punished at all.

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> Boeing unfortunately has to be bailed out, if we as a world want airplane as a method of transportation. It’s only Boeing and Airbus, there are no others.

Somehow I suspect that if the earth swallowed every employee of Boeing and Airbus, and every plane ever produced by either, there would be more airplanes and more airplane manufacturers soon enough.

Sure, eventually and corners will be cut to expedite that long development and testing window.

May even be better in the end, though let's say the USSR and NASA stopped space launch vechiles - how long would it take to make an alternative. Longer than we appreciate.

Sure, eventually and corners will be cut to expedite that long development and testing window.

So, still Boeing.

Maybe Elon Musk would just create a branch off Space X and manufacture airplanes...

Ahh yes... The "switch editor" button in Kerbal space program to the rescue.

you mean the guy who is trying to get his factory workers to come in and build luxury cars during the greatest pandemic facing mankind in generations.

he seems trustworthy.

Luxury cars largely co-financed by the government :D

Soon enough will still be around a decade - the development/tooling development for your average sedan is already 5+ years, and that's building off of previous experience and technology. I can't imagine what it would be for creating a vehicle bigger than a doublewide that has to be hefted in the air by 100k lbf engines from scratch

Sure, that's fair, but a Boeing bankruptcy is unlikely to actually kill every employee and destroy every existing plane, so recovery might be faster than that.

Hobbiests construct air plains from off the shelf components fairly often. Large passenger planes are difficult but not impossible. It’s not like all the engineers working on these just disappear either, they’ll want a job doing what they’re good at.

Bailing these things out only protects executives and shareholders, I hope you’re not arguing that those have been doing a good thing for the world recently.

That's just silly. Bankrupting Boeing does not destroy 140 years of aviation technology or make aeronautic engineers forget their training. Neither does it erase the thousands of aircraft flying today. All those assets that Boeing has inefficiently hoarded now becomes available for other, more competent organisations and businesses.

If a company is too big to let fail, it's too big. We should have blocked any mergers or acquisitions that made Boeing larger.

For now, give them a loan, as much as they need, interest free for 10 years. No more bonuses nor stock buybacks until the loan has been repaid.

Why free money? Give them a loan in exchange for controlling stake and future profit, like any other investor.

And we seem to have stumbled upon the Chinese economic system

Except the US has already kind of done that before. Ex the treasury stake in GM.

Well, at least on the downside. The gains are privatized, the losses socialized - a private good when times are good, a public good when they are not.

The problem with this is then the state is now responsible for this thing, which wasn't able to keep itself afloat financially. This works in a some cases, where the state is actually more efficient at managing than a private corp, but in many cases you just have the taxpayers supporting zombie corporations.

> Boeing unfortunately has to be bailed out

No one has to be bailed out. They can take out loans, issue new shares, or file for bankruptcy. The government should not be bailing anyone out.

If you let the corporation go bankrupt, the shares become worthless. But the assets remain, and can be taken over by new owners, who can keep producing airplanes etc.

At least that's the bankruptcy theory. Real world bankruptcy may well have a lot more friction.

Feel free to educate me on how the real world works here!

You can let the purely virtual "company" frame go bust (and the top management - would that really be a problem in such a case, and not the main purpose of such an action?) - and immediately use the assets and people to build new ones with minimal disruption. The factories don't have to be stopped for a single minute.

Not to mention that maybe letting them get so big was a mistake in the first place? Based on petty power games of "leaders" (in politics, finance and business) and not on technical necessities.

The problem is all of the employees of said companies. It's not their fault the company makes the decisions it did/does, yet it is their work that generates the money for the executives to do what they do. So my suggestion is for the bail out to go through, the entire executive level (however deep that needs to go) must be replaced. Keep the actual working employees.

the new company could just rehire all non exec-employees.

> ... the entire executive level (however deep that needs to go) must be replaced.

Determining how deep that goes is tough. Replacing the executive level is admitting the company must replace with a radically different culture. Those take time to cultivate, and the US incentives are aligned such that without great effort, standard American business culture is to evolve to what we see from Boeing. The tragedy isn't that Boeing is exceptional in its systemic broken culture, the tragedy is that this is par for the entire American business edifice without assiduous work by company leadership (many examples of that working away without recognition, but business journalism shares blame in lionizing on KPIs that don't measure for the brokenness); Boeing is simply different by scale of acute fatalities flowing straight from the business culture.

Nationalize them and let them slowly rot away - what's the argument against that?

Buy it out and nationalise it if it is that important to the country. Anything else is lining shareholders and no assurance staff of these entities still won't feel the brunt.

> Management should be punished excessively as a warning to others, though I do not expect them to be punished at all.

"Management" is a group of ordinary people who are doing their jobs - trying to maximize profits for their employers. I'm not going to sit here and say my job is any different. I'm writing code so my employer will make money, not anyone else.

What specifically are you going to punish management for?

> trying to maximize profits for their employers

> What specifically are you going to punish management for?

Maybe punish them for their myopic view on "maximizing profits"? What's worth more: $100 in profit in Q1, or $25 in profit for the next 8 quarters? It would better for everyone if we had a return to sustainability in the private sector.

That they get propped up is a major reason no competitors appear. No one thinks it's wise to try to invest a huge sum, when their competitors are entities backed by governments.

It wouldn't be that long for new companies to pop up if the only two players collapsed. People can just buy the existing facilities for making parts and assembly.

"if we as a world want airplane as a method of transportation"~

Maybe we ought to rethink the extent of our wants versus our needs.

(Just Quoting) 'But a culture of contribution doesn’t succeed in a vacuum.'

'Why what we’ve been doing stopped working and why you don’t have to assume it: So, there was a chaotic system and an organizational structure on top of that system that could not react to disruption and the wheels ground to a halt. (...)'

Asked just one Topic away, 'Is the status quo scaling?' P-:

But only because we allowed them to purchase all of their competition -- letting them become too big to fail.

Sick companies have to die in order for capitalism to survive. In the long term people will lose trust in this system because every new bailout puts pressure on everybody in the system for generations. No bailouts of companies over 250 people ever again.

Embraer obviously isn't quite a Boeing or Airbus but their E-Jets seem like viable narrow-body jets. Now if the argument is that the USA isn't ok with all of the big jet manufacturers being foreign, then yeah, they have to bail Boeing out.

There's Comac, with pretty much unlimited money behind it.

There is no commercial Boeing. They've outsourced. Let them go bust, someone that has a clue can buy the company and run it.

Someone else will buy the assets and restart manufacturing, maybe with less safety issues even

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