Boeing cutting more than 12,000 U.S. jobs with thousands more planned
reuters.com
reuters.com
First the research goes. Then the product engineering drops. Then there's mass layoffs. Then the whole thing falls apart.
To an accountant, a drop in costs is as valuable to the business as a rise in revenue. To everyone else, this is obviously not true. Risking future profits to cut current costs is a great move according to an accountant. For everyone else, it's corporate suicide.
Edit: I realise COVID. But that's the excuse, not the reason.
Most shares belong to 401k retirement accounts of the middle class.
Who is looking out for them? Not the CEO and I don’t think the board either. You need to have a lot of shares before you have an influence.
As a result, some of that voting is running - literally - on autopilot, see https://www.issgovernance.com/solutions/proxy-voting-service... and https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/11/29/the-realities-of-...
Some fund companies commit to following ISS advice across the board or on certain topics. Others like Vanguard delegate the voting power to fund managers (who have access to ISS reports but aren't obliged to follow it slavishly).
Many studies show that private equity owned companies, which typically run businesses the leanest, actually perform better.
Also:
>Public-to-private buyouts involve greater leverage and bankruptcy risk but few advantages in financial returns, at least in recent decades. Private-to-private buyouts appear more likely to create value by relaxing financial constraints and improving management practices.
Public-to-private buyouts are generally the ones people get angry about, and it seems that they're economically bad in addition to the social consequences. I don't think people generally object to one private equity firm buying from another.
They are saying, clearly: don't let the accountants run the business.
You're shooting the messenger when the core issue is that Boeing, like all publicly traded companies do not have medium to long-term views for their business. It is always quarter-to-quarter. That is what management is judged on, because their job and their compensation is tied to maximize shareholder returns.
I am guessing aircraft manufacturing is going to severely depressed in the medium term. Customers are delaying deliveries, canceling orders etc. Demand will likely not return to pre covid levels in even one year. Even if it does, airlines are not in any financial position to make significant purchases for few years. On top of it 737-MAX issues and resulting hold in manufacturing of that line has not left Boeing in a great shape.
Clearly there are some downsides, but managing them via laws and regulations is possible.
Of course, those are both ridiculous extremes - the answer to what balance is healthiest for an economy I'm sure is immensely complicated. I'm just saying that efficiency doesn't come without costs, and we shouldn't design our entire economy completely around the interests of shareholders of major corporations.
That said, I have serious doubts that everything can be automated as that suggests all human labor would be providing zero value.
You can't even build a factory in a quarter.
In reality larger companies usually prosper for many decades, because they do plan long term.
Boeing's stock is up on the news. Lost jobs = lower payroll = improved cash flow. That's the bottom line. Shareholders couldn't care less how you arrive there, just that you do.
Why do people keep repeating this garbage over and over and over? It just isn't true.
Amazon literally didn't make profits for 10 years. Many other tech companies haven't made a cent yet, but investors are looking 5-10 years into the future for those.
Some businesses just make bad decisions, others make good decisions. Overall the free market/public corporation system is a resounding success. Just because boeing messed up doesn't say anything about the rest of the system.
We don't have a free market. The market is not allowed to implode. Mega corporations and banks are not allowed to fail. Boeing is not allowed to fail, and that fact, more than anything else, explains why they are such a poorly run company. Where you see a "resounding success" I see an absolute failure that is closer to a scam or a ponzi scheme than a legitimate system.
What a deal!
So the mass layoffs are just a mirage, and not a failure at all, are they?
Yet for some reason, nobody's buying from the stores that are open.
Boeing didn't take the money anyways, so I don't know why people are so riled up about it.
The defense part of Boeing used to be a separate company (McD). DoD could easily let commercial fail and spin out McD again, or just shrink to defense only. For a long time, Airbus has claimed that the DoD spending subsidizes the commercial side. So TBH, letting commercial fail would result in more bang for the DoD buck.
Regarding military activities, I don't doubt that there are engineering synergies between commercial aviation and military aviation. However I've always heard that from a commercial perspective the two are at odds: for a defense organization you want to make sure to keep as little cash on hands, as it's fairly easy to ask for more. There are always scope changes, delays and shit happening. The last thing you want is to have a war chest that your customers will ask you to tap in to cover the costs of contradictory requirements, feature creep and original underbidding to win the contract. See the A400M as an example: the civil side of Airbus is coughing up quite a lot of cash for that clusterfuck.
On the other hand, developing civil airliners requires cash. A lot of cash. You can't ask American Airlines to cough up some extra cash because your 787 is delayed and is costing more to produce than anticipated. In fact the opposite is true: because your 787 is delayed, your customers will pay much less, and only when you can actually deliver the product (for the most part). Bombardier didn't have pockets deep enough to sustain the CSeries...
Amazon went public in 1997. Boeing went public in 1962.
You get leeway as a young-ish public company, which will expire once you are an established player. How do you think markets are going to react if the bottom falls out of Amazon's business in 2055?
Yeah, and they caught never-ending flak for it until AWS starting turning a profit and eventually dragged Amazon into the black. Amazon was/is the exception, not the rule.
Long range plans get re-evaluated periodically because things change, both technology and markets but I have never experienced them being either ignored or thrown out in pursuit of the quarterly 'numbers.'
That said, if your senior management doesn't understand all aspects of your product value, they will make poor choices both in the short term and for the long term.
I would imagine that it is easy to push a narrative that execs are greedy, short sighted and barely competent. I would imagine this can be true, but more than likely its a bunch of factors that aren't public that led to less than optimal decision making.
I have a pet theory that a large portion of the decay in our society can be traced back to the layers of abstraction between stakeholders and the things (and people) they have power over. Usually this kind of thing doesn't happen before a company has gone public.
But I wonder at what point you have to draw the line and quit excusing any and all behavior as the result of misaligned incentives, and simply hold people morally and ethically accountable for the choices they make?
The human conscience doesn't do very well with abstractions. The further removed someone's actions are from the damage caused down the line, the weaker that moral signal gets. If we want to improve our society, we have to be realistic about these things and design our institutions to buttress against them.
Sure, it only works if the people in question care about your opinion, but building consensus on what acts should be shunned only takes about a generation and a half. Segregation, dog fighting, the list is long. If we really think this is bad for society (and I do) then shrugging and talking about incentives isn't the way forward. Especially in the absence of a mechanic to actually change those incentives.
Your statement is contradictory, incentives are what hold people accountable.
There are plenty of buy-and-hold shareholders investing in bluechips.
Entrepreneurial capitalism was a constellation of small private enterprises, often family-owned. Managerial capitalism is characterized by the dominance of firms publicly traded on capital markets, and managed by professional managers who are often distinct from the shareholders.
Entrepreneurial capitalism, I believe, better aligns incentives by combining the shareholder and manager role. It also reduces dependence on capital markets, which can become a single point of failure during a financial panic. Lastly entrepreneurial capitalism makes coordination between competitors less likely, whereas such coordination is embraced by the mergers and acquisitions arms of banks in a mangerial capitalist system quite openly.
The only advantage of managerial capitalism is scale. Pooling capital in public markets permits massive economies of scale and their efficiencies.
Where modern capitalism falls down is complexity. There's 3 (non-niche) desktop operating systems, for example, and way more than 3 attributes that consumers care about in a computer. Or cars, or TVs, or airplanes, or anything else that costs more than $20. There's simply not enough levers by which consumers can send any meaningful signal through the market to producers. This breaks the Invisible Hand.
Nowadays, well, you got your Bezos and you got your Uber...
My pet theory is a specific instance of yours: MBAs wielding spreadsheets (and, more generally, analysts wielding databases) is the abstraction layer.
One of the points it makes is that shareholders have very little power in practice, as even if you own a million dollars of Apple shares, that's only 0.00007% of the company. Not exactly enough to force through a motion on your own.
And if you think you'll build up a coalition to get a majority? Good luck doing that when you can't even find out the names of other shareholders.
Minority shareholder lawsuits? They're actually a negligible force; rare, unlikely to succeed, and low impact even when they do.
And that's without getting into 'preference shares' that grant CEOs outsized voting rights.
The book argues management can neglect shareholders' interests with impunity for these reasons.
This is almost worse, because it very explicitly cares only about the short-term price. It's also a much harder problem to solve, because you can't just tell those people "think long-term and ethically when you're exercising your impact on the marketplace!". No matter how ethical they may be as individuals, most of them probably don't even know which companies they have stakes in, much less whether those companies are heading in the right direction!
There is no short term price in stocks. Stocks are valued at their perceived long term value. If shareholders suspect a company is sacrificing the long term for the short term, they're going to dump the stock until the price of it drops to reflect that.
This also implies that if you can reliably detect that a company is eating its seed corn before everyone else does, you can make a mint shorting it.
Hogwash. Pretty much every company on the S&P 500 dropped 30% around March. Did their perceived long-term value change 30%? I doubt it. I think most people were fully aware that most companies in the S&P's 10 year value wasn't going to change much; certainly not 30%. Yet, it dropped 30%. And then the next month it has risen back up to about 10% of its all-time high. I don't think people seriously thought that Apple, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, etc. suddenly dropped in value 30% and then suddenly rose 20% (yes, I know, technically it was more). If you can have swings of +/- 30% over a period of two months, I don't think the value is reflecting the long-term prospects.
There is both short-term AND long-term pricing in stocks. "In the short-run, the market is a voting machine. In the long-run, the market is a weighing machine." Ben Graham
Double hogwash. That pricing reflected that people suddenly needed cash right now and was irrespective of what anyone thought about long term value. I will bet most of the sellers bitterly regretted it but saw no option but to sell at whatever price they could get because they had urgent immediate needs.
Price volatility is an indication that either economic conditions are changing rapidly which affects the long term prospects, or that people are very unsure about what the long term prospects are.
It is not an indication that companies are being rewarded for eating their seed corn.
BTW, years ago, I knew a CEO who believed in manipulating the accounts to boost the short term at the expense of the long term. He made the mistake of telling the press he was doing this. The stock immediately tanked.
If the short term pricing theory was correct, the stock would have risen.
Then we have companies like Amazon, who explicitly say they are sacrificing short term profits for long term growth. The result? The stock price has soared to incredible heights.
While they might be implicitly in your first group, attending significant meetings AND ensuring long term growth are primary responsibilities.
And it shouldn't be. The board has only 24 hours in a day, not remotely enough time to debate every motion from every shareholder.
However, as a shareholder, you can dump your stock, which does send a message when many shareholders do this.
Indeed - but brundolf laments about the lack of shareholders "bothered with [Boeing's] nuances or long-term health" and having only a single one-bit message is not conducive to nuance.
It's not about leverage it's about taking time and figuring out what you are investing in. Everyone wants the free ride of "investing" nobody actually wants to pick stocks by doing research into which companies have sustainable businesses and good governance.
closet indexing while charging high fees is the most common
starting a bunch of different funds, and then when one of them outperforms by chance, marketing that one as the one is another.
Particularly in the case of stock indexes - where a single company with a $xxT poorly written contract could wipe out the entire index and everyone who held it.
"Company A agrees to purchase for $1000 each product offered by company B which meet the specifications provided".
And Company B finds that the spec says "A quartz crystal between 1um and 1mm in diameter".
So company B goes and finds a beach, full of sand, calculates there are 1 billion grains of sand in each cubic meter of the beach, and the beach is 50m long, 50m deep, and 50m wide. Total amount is 50 * 50 * 50 * 1 billion * $1000 = $125 quadrillion.
Far more than all the money in the world.
That bankrupts the company, but since there is no liability limit, it bankrupts every other investor. Even if you have 0.0001% of the company, you're still bankrupt.
If you have insurance, the insurance company is bankrupt, and you're still on the hook for whatever remains, which bankrupts you too.
Edit: ah, I should've been more specific about that. Still, I didn't say anything about the liability being unlimited.
Contractual liability is a thing...
See, for example, Juicero, Bird, Boosted, Magic Leap, Theranos, etc.
However, some of your examples aren't great IMO. Theranos should have been ONLY R&D, as it was never a product that was ready to bring to market. Same with Magic Leap.
I think also due to Boeing's business of making tin cans move hundreds of miles of hour thousands of feet in the air, means the engineering department should be their primary focus as well, thus all the outrage at the company.
Do you have any evidence that “accountants” made this decision? Or that COVID is merely an excuse?
It is blindingly obvious that Boeing has been quite adversely affected by this pandemic and that global travel is unlikely to return to normal levels for at least 2-3 years. No amount of extra spending on R&D or product engineering is going to save your airplane company when people don’t want to get on the plane.
Boeing lost their way in the 90s when the MD merger turned them into an accountant-managed company whereas they were previously engineering-managed. The resulting 737MAX disaster is the main source of their problems today, not COVID.
(McDonnell's Stonecipher was an engineer that rose into management ranks and was the one that thought up the brilliant idea to just cut costs regardless of the consequences.)
- golf buddy convinces CEO of well-run software shop: your company is way too inefficient "your per-employee ratios are off the charts low!"
- golf buddy gets hired as Chief Strategy Officer, hires a bunch of high paid underlings
- they decide the freeze wages, reduces bonuses, reduces benefits for software engineers. Lots of savings to show! (unless you also count inflated salaries of new management)
- Software engineers demoralized, best ones move on to better jobs, adverse selection, more demoralization
- Golf buddy hires more project managers -- because obviously the answer to underpaid SWEs is to hire more managers. Beatings will continue until morale improves.
- Now the company really does have bad metrics. Decisions are made to offshore half the staff -- save 30%, but increase work for onshore staff. Offshore staff is great, but at a disadvantage due to distance and not having context/proximity to business.
- Golf buddy hires product managers to better define specs, more project managers to produce more reports.
- Gold buddy, his friends, ride off with their big paychecks to spoil the next company
Been there, been done like that.
The sudden shift in staffing comes from the sudden shift in demand.
This is so completely not true. Worked with the Finance Dept heavily at my last job. The accountants keep track of the expenses, and make sure everyone is sticking to the budgets...but the accountants don't make the budgets. Management does. The accountants are the ones making sure that the company can actually pay for everything.
To an accountant, a drop in costs is as valuable to the business as a rise in revenue.
This is also false. To an accountant, a drop in costs is literally the exact opposite of a rise in revenue. (For comparison, it would be like saying that to a software developer having a more powerful computer is the same as writing your software to be more efficient.) A drop in costs is only valuable to the accounting team if there's not enough money to pay for everything, because then the drop in costs makes it possible to pay for more of the bills that the rest of the company incurs. The Finance Dept would absolutely prefer to see more revenue over a drop in costs, because revenue is repeatable and sustainable, while reducing costs is not.
Management are the folks that only cares about the bottom line regardless of how it's reached.
Blame management.
By "blame accountants" the OP was referring to management being accountants. Nobody sincerely believes that accountants have the power to do layoffs, but managements that were previously accountants won't see the long term destruction in value, only the short term profits.
Perhaps this is why accountants and MBA types run businesses and software devs continue to just develop software for their bosses. You know, the ones who understand business more deeply. Because that's what they do. To misappropriate Sorkin: if software devs are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?
They were engineers.
Yes, the guys who had the bright idea to just cut R&D and all capital investment were engineers, not accountants.
There's a lot of companies out there that just throw some more hardware at a problem.
It is easy to get caught in a trap thinking heavily about money. When thinking about things we own, the emotion and fear centers are aroused far more than when we think about other people. To avoid this, I believe our society must be trained away from neoliberal and 'greed is good' thought.
Blaming people for this state of events, or the addictive qualities of facebook, or the dangerous misinformation spread designed to take advantage of cognitive flaws of the human mind - these practices will get us nowhere. One thing that businesses started doing right was the blameless postmortem.
Find the problem, fix it. Move on.
There are many issues with Boeing management today (I used to work there so I love flaming them as much as anyone), but it's hard for me to imagine how any aircraft company could avoid this. All aerospace employers are laying off (or furloughing) workers by the thousands:
Airbus: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-airbus...
Bombardier: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/bombardier-layoffs-quebe...
Gulfstream: https://www.wtoc.com/2020/05/04/gulfstream-lays-off-employee...
No word from Embraer yet, but since their deal with Boeing fell through, I imagine it's only a matter of time.
While I have no doubt Boeings business has been cyclical, many of the problems they face today can also be attributed to bad management.
These problems can be linked back to when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, resulting in it's loss of engineering focus:
https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl...
If you read the wiki page for McDonnell Douglas it reads a lot like the modern day Boeing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas
This gives a hint as to how that merger help to infect Boeing (no pun intended) with it's current bad management culture.
https://www.newsweek.com/boeing-airlines-under-fire-90-billi...
Step 1: Give billions in stock buy backs and ask for billions in tax cuts
Step 2: Demand that taxpayers to bail you out in a recession
Step 3: Repeat
- Infect-being
- In fact being
- Etc.
Thanks for the help.
Edit: To clarify one could argue Boeing's problems are due to COVID-19 infections not due to a MD infection.
It's just the virus.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...
Matt Stoller also talked about this cultural shift that enabled Boeings problems in an article a year ago.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout
I also wonder if there are similar accounts of the same happening in other companies.
Also, despite the narrative, it may very well have already been the case that Boeing's culture was going down the gutter, its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas a reflection of that rather than the root cause.
EDIT: Here's a 2002 article that suggests it was all of these phenomena--disproportionate leadership roles, a claim to cost control expertise, a skittish board, and evolving business strategies. https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Hard-nosed-Stonec... Some former McDonnell Douglas executives, like Boeing President and COO Harry Stonecipher, were well placed to take control when the inevitable cash crunch happened. Stonecipher replaced the Boeing CFO with a GM executive. See also this contemporaneous 1998 article describing the same event: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... That article says it was Stonecipher and the board chairman, Phil Condit, who forced the CFO out for his overly conservative accounting. Condit, AFAIU, was also CEO at the time and had been CEO of Boeing prior to the McDonnell Douglas merger. In fact, Condit led multiple acquisitions before MD, which suggests to me he and Boeing were already following the "acquire rather than innovate" playbook.
>In the eyes of many Boeing employees, McDonnell Douglas executives seemed to do disproportionately well out of the merger: Many were given senior positions following the acquisition, with the company’s head, Harry Stonecipher initially appointed chief operating officer and holding more than twice the number of shares in the company as Condit, who remained CEO. Stonecipher and John McDonnell, formerly the chair of McDonnell Douglas’ board, were now the two largest individual shareholders of the merged companies."
In a 2007 interview, Ron Woodard, the former president of Boeing’s Commercial Airplane Group, bemoaned the changes the merger brought with it. “We thought that we’d kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the ropes,” he said. “I still believe that Harry outsmarted Phil and his gang bought Boeing with Boeing’s money."[1][2]
[1] https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
Do the cyclic layoffs generally occur right when they're supposed to be building hundreds of planes? I think what's unusual about this round of layoffs is that it was caused by all their orders being cancelled.
If Boeing isn't alarmed by this situation -- if they chalk it up to an historic pattern -- I think that in itself is a sign of bad management.
It seems like retaining people instead of hiring up a bunch of new people and possibly losing some of your best people would be a better approach.
Sure, the other guys might get ahead of you a bit during the boom times, but you'll get a good jump during the bust and be much better positioned to take advantage of the next boom.
You hit the nail in the head. When it rains, the moneyfolk want to hoard as much cash as they can (shareholders gotta buy that new Porsche).
It's like temporary employment in hotels and restaurants during summer in touristic places.
Only the cycle is 8y/2y (up/down) in the decade) of 4mo/8mo (up/down) in the year.
Do more with less, learn how to solve hard problems so you don't have to pay other people who maybe won't actually fix those problems.
Demand for planes has cratered due to COVID. That's a 100% valid reason to cut jobs, not an "excuse".
It's received wisdom that MD did a reverse takeover of Boeing, that Condit got snookered by Stonecipher.
Have many friends, family, neighbors who've worked at Boeing, from 1960s thru this year. This version of the post mortem is a good starting point.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
Hutzpah is begging the court's leniency, claiming to be an orphan, after murdering one's parents. Or eating the seed corn and then being surprised by the famine.
You get the idea.
I have zero sympathy for the wrecking crew who destroyed an American icon and rage on behalf of all the workers, families, and taxpayers who paid the price.
I thought Boeing’s composites tech is way ahead of Airbus’s.
Marginal gains is the name of the game for airliners. A 2% increase in fuel efficiency is something airlines drool over.
> It's much more important to make a plane that's safe enough to actually remain in the air.
Which Boeing unequivocally does. Ya, they stumbled with the 737-MAX, but all the other perfectly good 737 variants are still the workhorse of most airlines. There's still more 737's flying around than Airbus A320 variants (including the A321). That doesn't even account for all the 767, 777 and 787's flying around the world every day... nor all the 747's and DC10/MD-11's shuttling freight too.
It's not if the resultant airplane isn't safe to use. 2% improvement over nothing (because you can't even fly the damn thing) is nothing.
Most of the success stories you're referring to are the old Boeing, from decades past. The 787 had lots of problems but they did eventually get it dialed in with fortunately no fatal crashes, just having lost many billions of dollars in overruns. But their most recent plane is an absolute disaster. They can't keep coasting on the successes of the past without making more successes in the future. These layoffs are prove of it. On their current trajectory, they are failing.
Are you trying to make some nationalistic point, or just make yourself sound superior?
Sometimes aircraft crash due to faults in design or user interface; examples include the DC-10 cargo doors, de Havilland Comet, and arguably Airbus' own A330 in the case of AF447. Two Boeing aircraft crashed for a series of reasons, yet Boeing still has a storied history of making very safe, effective aircraft.
Yes, while crucially, making your plane safe enough to fly.
> Are you trying to make some nationalistic point
From the HN rules: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I'll have you know, I'm Nth generation American, never lived anywhere else. My American identity, however, is emphatically not wrapped up in this one particular company. I can be honest when it's faltering and not doing well without feeling like I'm letting down my national identity. Can you?
This storied history you're referring to is the old Boeing. The new Boeing (the one taken over in a reverse merger by McDonnell Douglas business people) isn't doing so great.
Most of the A380 and A350 are composite, just put together differently to the 787.
Airbus also now have access to the most advanced composite lay-up technology, used by Bombardier Belfast to build the A220 wings.
The real pioneer was Beech, with the all-composite Starship; it took huge balls to release that on the commercial market, and sadly the gamble didn't pay off. They went back to building aluminium King Airs.
Here's a good overview: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/composite-materials-aircra...
Metals have inherent temperature-resistance and repairability that composites don't have, and support transsonic and supersonic flight heating.
Some early aircraft that used composites ended up heavier than aluminum, so achieved no benefit.
I consider metals to be higher tech than composites for aircraft construction.
Also, metal can be quickly stamped, whereas composites are generally made by vacuum forming, which is a slow process that's hard to parallelize.
Most of the WW2 planes you've heard of were made of metal in runs of 10,000 to 20,000 each, impossible for composites - you might get 10% or less.
Any such bailout isn't going to be enough to bring back jobs in the commercial aircraft business, which is likely where most of these job cuts are coming from.
I agree that those jobs are likely not coming back, but the company isn't going anywhere since the US just lost a lot of clout covering Boeing when the MAX incident happened - they're not going to give up on it now.
1. Both sides of the aisle have large amounts of corruption and are ineffective to the citizenry - but the GOP really loves driving home the benefits of bootstraps.
https://www.businessinsider.com/lufthansa-government-fund-ap...
The Pentagon and Congress pushed for defense contractors to consolidate, in the hopes that the skills needed to produce military grade aircraft would be preserved. The US went from having Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Boeing, Hughes, Vought, Grumman, McDonnell Douglas, Raytheon, Northrop, General Dynamics.
All of these contractors were merged under Pentagon guidance into Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. In the US, these three really have no competition since most military contracts prohibit foreign companies from entering bids.
P-8, get back to me after a few more airframe years at low altitude patrols. It’s not going to be pretty.
ASW has been starved of funds and attention for so long. The P-8 is really an MPA, not so much an ASW platform. It can do some of the job, but compared to the S-3/P-3, it makes some sacrifices. The nice thing is that it can transit an area quickly.
Could you expand on that?
Airbus and Embraer both make substantially better planes in the same/similar segment.
Granted, most 737 MAX orders were for larger variants, and also the 737 flies farther (the Embraer is very much more of a regional jet). But there's a lot of routes that could be done using either, and the Embraer wins many of those, even before you consider the fact that the 737 MAX flat-out can't fly them at all since it's grounded indefinitely.
So overall they've got superior competition from Airbus throughout the entire segment, and superior competition from Embraer at the bottom of the segment as well. Boeing is in a rough spot. They should have built a clean sheet redesign of the 737 awhile ago to handle the same segment, but they did not, and now they're really suffering for it.
Now if someone built a plane with the same type certificate required with capacity from 25 to 300 (exact bound are of course negotiable) passengers and can deliver in quantity that would catch South west's attention and probably change their entire fleet. I suspect that isn't possible but...
MCAS is a longitudinal stability enhancement. It is not for stall prevention (although indirectly it helps) or to make the MAX handle like the NG (although it does); it was introduced to counteract the non-linear lift generated by the LEAP-1B engine nacelles at high AoA and give a steady increase in stick force as the stall is approached as required by regulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer#Boeing-Embraer_joint_v...
Specifically the 737 and 757 are based on very old designs.
With respect to type ratings, Airbus shares type ratings between the 330, 340, and 350, but the 340 is basically gone (few operators), and the 320 (their most numerous airframe) is a different type. Boeing has common type ratings for the 777 and 787, as well as for the 757 and 767.
The interim airliner would be an enhanced 767, that is still in production (although not as a passenger aircraft).
It's A330/A330Neo together, but A340 and A350 separately, 3 separate types
757/767 but 777 and 787 separately
(And 747 and 747-4/8 are separate as well)
https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2014/10/the-common-t...
FAA (and maybe EASA) takes it as 2 types but it only requires a difference training from the 330->350.
From the link: The new regulatory approval means that pilots who are qualified and current on the A330 can already commence their preparations to take the A350 XWB’s controls by undergoing “differences training” only
Based on https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/609896-sff-a330-a350.html
Boeing didn't have the cash to develop a clean ship 737 successor because of the issues with 787 production. Although the 787 has become (pre-COVID) quite a cash cow, in 2011 when Boeing decided to do the 737MAX instead of the NSA it was in a very poor shape: 20~30 billions USD hole, 3 years delayed, and no positive cash flow expected for years to come.
The house was on fire, it was not the right time to commit to a new clean-sheet design, although it would probably have been the right decision (hindsight...).
2. (of a competitor in a sports race or match) having a lower score or weaker performance than other competitors.
‘she finished ten meters in arrears’
It comes from "to the rear". So, in a competition (against Airbus), it means you're behind the person in first. On a payment schedule, it means you're behind the schedule.
Every other time someone was behind, they were just "behind" -- never saw that prompt the use of a legalistic French term the way that "being in arrears" did.
Edit: O...kay, getting some pushback on this. Let me try to explain with another analogy.
Let's say I saw a comment that read, "He got involved in human trafficking because he has a mortgage."
I had only ever seen "mortgage" used to referred to a secured loan for a home.
So I'd interpret the statement to mean, "he has a big debt he wants to pay and needs money and that motivated him to do slimy things for it."
But let's further say I had specific knowledge that that guy had paid off his home loan years ago. Then I'd be confused and say so, "uh, what? He doesn't even have a mortgage."
Then a bunch of people respond to say, "oh, duh, 'mortgage' comes from the French 'death pledge'[1] -- here they were talking about how he had pledged his life to serve the cartels on pain of death." "Oh, yeah, man, I use 'mortgage' all the time to refer to a blood oath."
That ... would definitely be news to me. Sure -- I wasn't aware of people who had used it the other way. But do you see why I would never have abstracted "mortgage" to refer to death pledges in general, even with great abstraction skills?
Note: "Mortgage", to my knowledge, is not used in English in this other way -- I'm just conveying the sense of surprise there to learn that, had it actually been true.
The right expression is la porte arrière (not "en arrière"), which usually means the back door of a vehicle. Some will more correctly say la portière arrière. It will rarely endorse the other meaning of "back door". Out of context, absolutely no one would see anything sexual in this expression.
On the other hand, la porte de derrière will point to the door which is on the back side, for instance the back door of a house. In some contexts, it may convey some sexual innuendo.
In modern French, it's used both literally and figuratively. A common folk song goes "3 pas en arrière…" (3 steps backward). Similarly, "arriérés" could mean "people with retrograde mindsets", or "arrears", i.e. rent or taxes that should have already been paid. I suppose the English language merged "arriérés" and "arrière" into a single word.
This use here is spot on, but not common.
I like uses like this one. Gives a bit of texture to the conversation.
(counterpoint -- the USG threw money at auto-makers)
Boeing lays off a quarter of its workforce once or twice a decade. Airplanes are big, long term investments (big airliners tend to live to the ripe old age of 30 or so) and the demand and sale of them comes and goes with the global economy. The economy slows periodically, orders dry up, and factory workers don't have any work for a long time (or more like the years long order queue gets quite a bit shorter with old orders cancelled and few new orders coming in). It's a cyclical business that can't help but to make significant adjustments to its workforce.
A brief, incomplete and possibly inaccurate history of Boeing layoffs:
* 31,000 September 2001
* 28,000 December 1998
* 28,000 1992
* 2,160 2012
A bit like they modernized their 737?
>hack that necessitated MCAS and doomed the MAX.
The issue is not that the airframe required it but that the corporate culture looked at this issue and concluded lets do it. Lets do it DESPITE the problems...that's the company you've got leading the modernization of the 757 you propose.
Boeing will pull through with flying colours though. US won't allow their only commercial plane maker to fail even if they need to build planes out of freshly printed Papier-mâché dollars
In the sense that they can still access liquidity from credit markets, yes. But they're paying a pretty hefty interest rate of 4.50% over the risk-free rate.[1]
That kind of borrowing cost, when compounded, starts to become pretty crippling for any sort of long-term R&D or product development. Compared to a high-grade corporate, a project with a 10-year payback time is 50% more expensive at Boeing's current cost of borrowing.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/boeing-lands-25-billion-de...
The 757 is out of production, although the tooling is in storage somewhere. Restarting production would be a huge undertaking by itself, not accounting for modernizing the airliner. It's all blueprints on sheets of paper. And Airbus could quite easily answer with a rewinged, slightly longer A320 (the long-rumored A322) that they admitted to have worked on... Although so far Airbus seems content with just the A321NEO-XLR: cheap to develop, and good-enough to replace most 757 out there (more or less, depending on the model of 757 and the route).
A modernized 767, on the other hand, could be a winner: it's still in production as a freighter and has been modernized for its military variant (KC-46A Pegasus). It's smaller than the 787-8 so wouldn't canibalize sales too much. On the other side the only Airbus competitor is the A330-800 which is too long-range optimized (and thus large/heavy/expensive) to be competitive against a hypothetical medium-haul optimized 767. Really the A330-800 is not even competitive against the A330-900, Airbus shouldn't have built it at all, if you ask me...
> For now, Airbus is relying on government-backed furlough schemes in France, Germany and Britain to reduce staff costs after earlier asking employees to take 10 days’ leave.
And they lost the race against SpaceX for crew transport to the ISS (with no ETA for certification for their crew transporter).
The workers they're laying off, that's the remainder of your operational knowledge walking out the door. They didn't train a new crop of engineers to replace the aging ones.
I think we'll see Lockheed or Northrup acquire whatever components the DoD needs, and the commercial aviation division will be acquired by another conglomerate.
They're probably just redundant. The 737 MAX debacle meant they weren't going to sell those planes this year, but the coronavirus meant they weren't going to sell those planes this year. Same result from one as both.
And Airbus has to deal with the same thing now, whereas before Boeing had a unique disadvantage.
Boeing messed up the 737-MAX but I don't remember Airbus as a huge source of innovation recently.
But I'm no aviation buff, I'd be happy to learn more.
Yes, the A-380 (different segment) did poorly. Boeing actually had a nice thing going for them with the 787.
Recently, maybe. But the 787 program had its fair share of major issues with the significant delays during development and then the battery fires that led to the fleet being grounded.
McDonnell Douglas was purchased almost 25 years ago, so perhaps it may be a little unfair to ascribe all of Boeing's current problems to that one event. Still, as an engineer, I can't help but notice executive management operate in similar politically-bent ways at some tech companies I've worked at.
Planes have a very long development cycle. If the foundations at Boeing started rotting on the day of the McDonnell-Douglas acquisition, it makes sense that we'd only start seeing it fall apart now.
We should expect an increase in ticket prices over the coming years.
The same thing happened after 9/11: fewer carriers, fewer options, and higher prices.
However, from "the stock market's perspective," everything at Boeing is honky dory -- the stock is up +2% today.
--
[a] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
Securing IP and existing tech within borders is much easier then preventing people from moving around.
Curious what folks in the aerospace community think.
A lot of "engineers" at Boeing are actually project / program / product managers and can pivot to similar roles at tech firms. The stress engineers have it a lot tougher.
Well, there's always automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, etc.
For mechanical engineers, market is not great, but not too bad I guess.
I wouldn’t be worried if I was in Poland as a web software engineer. I would be very worried if I was doing that in the United States right now.
We’ve seen many times already how fast software jobs dry up in high wage countries when the economy changes.
Military projects have it the worst. Depending on the program and funding, they either have access to modern tooling or such little funding that it prevents them from using something made in the last century. This company probably has one of the most impressive development tool catalogs a company can have, but most developers can't even take advantage of it. They have everything and a lot of the teams I worked with just couldn't use the stuff so the licenses sit on shelves burning cash. They renewed software we migrated away from, just in case... for auditing purposes. WTF?
They always had a crazy security protocol for why they cant do something too. I get it, defense is important. They tell me they want an air gapped system for X, cool here is the link to software X and MD5 from our authorized site/customer area. They're not allowed to download it, I still get it. Looks like I'm traveling to Colorado to hand over a USB stick. Without a second thought, I watched the SRE plug it right into his machine. Dude no. WTF? This would have been safer to download. Countless screen shares with people exposing private keys and passwords. The list just goes on and on and on. It's security theatre.
This company is also in love with the H1-B program. I don't mind H1-B at all, but when companies exploit humans from other countries so they don't have to pay American wages, that's where I draw the line, it's bad for everyone except Boeing. They are specifically gouging people from India. Couple this with their time tracking policies which I wont cover, their business practices are fairly absurd and rather disgusting.
Purchasing, holy balls. Every team purchases software differently. There is no consolidation or money saving practices. This has to do with funding, but someone could do this more intelligently. I tried having the conversation with them. Boeing, we want to give you back 250K in savings a year by not having 45 pieces of paper, it's a burden for us too. They don't care. Nothing matters over there. You follow the policy or look for a new job/vendor. It made me really sad having to work with them. I was so excited too, and it quickly faded with all the stupid stuff they've imposed on themselves which has led to lives being lost and costing people jobs.
Lot more to it than that, I'd say.
https://www.brightworkresearch.com/enterprisesoftwarepolicy/...
What ? That rings completely counter to everything I know about the aerospace field.
I spent my whole undergrad (Indian citizen) building planes and the big reason I left it was that no one in the airplane industry would hire engineers without security clearance. H1B engineers were legally impossible.
One of my aunts (US citizen) was a top level exec in GE Aviation, and she straight laughed in my face at the possibility of non-permanent residents / citizens getting jobs at any company deeply involved in defense. I have interviewed (2019) with Pratt and Whitney, and they too made it clear they won't apply for H1bs but they would apply for EB1 Green Cards...until which point (first 2-3 years) I would have to work on the small subset of non-defense projects. My friends who went to US top 10 universities for their masters in Aerospace literally returned to India because no one would hire them and another of my friend who was a scientist at ISRO (and more prestigious Indian defense programs he can't even state on his resume) hasn't gotten any call backs for job applications at Aerospace companies in the US because of being Indian. He has now pivoted to Applied Math as his graduate education.
As an Indian, I literally do not know a single person in the US with a job in the aeronautics industry. (Bar one that works at NASA-JPL in robotics and got his PR on hire, but he is literally one of the smartest and hardest working guy I know)
Now I understand that you aren't lying. But I would actually love to know more about the type of roles these H1Bs fulfill and how they get past these very real security issues.
My perspective as a non-American: I'd gladly work for less than "American wages" (which is still more than I earn in my country) in exchange for a shot at a green card.
When year 4/5 rolls around and it becomes time to pay the green card piper, they just fire you instead because legal paperwork is expensive and everything you struggled to build for yourself in America is instantly gone. Want that green card? Start the process over, 5 more years of indentured slavery.
It's not sustainable for anyone. I'd prefer they pay you what Americans make if they're going to ask you to live and work in America.
94 LCAs for H1B from 2015-2017 22 LCAs in 2018 25 LCAs in 2019
Doesn't look like too much love for H1Bs at The Boeing Company
https://metroairportnews.com/boeing-passes-on-accepting-fede...
[edit]
"That stance concerned lawmakers from Washington state, who urged Calhoun in a letter to “consider utilizing the economic assistance provided by the Cares Act to safeguard thousands of jobs at Boeing in Washington State and across the country.”"
These corporate only care about bottom line
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/ba
It's interesting how the common narrative uses metrics like low unemployment rates during certain touted "economic highs" and claim correlates, yet the popular narrative casts aside the correlation during times like this and jump into ambiguities and positive outlook for justification during certain "economic downturns."
It really, IMHO, helps illustrate just how disconnected many of these metrics are from economic prosperity for the vast majority of Americans.
Airbus says they still habe a queue of 7000(!) planes to deliver, with only a few cancellations.
https://www.airbus.com/aircraft/market/orders-deliveries.htm...
How is there a need to fire people if there is still so much demand?
> The company announced in April it would cut 10% of its worldwide workforce of 160,000 by the end of 2020.
From boeing.com:
> The company employs approximately 145,000 employees across the United States and in more than 65 countries.
90% of 160 is 144. The math checks out.
So, the article is roughly correct.
They are one of the largest military contractors (who supplies the country that spends the most on military), and it the only National aircraft manufacturer.
I feel for the people affected by this, but I don't doubt that Boeing will turn things around.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-dec-02-mn-49854...
With production halted for indefinite time for the 737 MAX, and no new orders for other planes due to covid that seems reasonable.
Still, even if planes don't do well right now and they had a few setbacks in their space business (Starliner delayed, and Boeing's moon lander proposal losing to competitors), they are still one of the largest defense contractors. They will be just fine.
As to your other point: my calculation results in an average. Total spending on defense divided by total spending gives you the average spending on defense as a percentage of average spending at local plus state plus federal levels.
Except for the thousands of people that are now unemployed.
I just saw this: "Boeing resumes production of its troubled 737 Max airplane " https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/27/21272478/boeing-737-max-r...
I joke, but also, I throw my hands into the air and say, "damn, I honestly have no idea how this all works, best just stick to target date mutual funds."
The top 1% in American own more than 50% of the securities. Using the stock market as any sort of proxy for aggregate quality of life for all Americans is like saying "Everyone must be doing great, caviar sales are through the roof!"
Just looked at the stock and options for Boeing. Going to sit this one out. I would normally be ordering a put/short with this news, but the way things are going wouldn’t be surprised to see their stock rise.
Nothing makes sense.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/10/surviving-nokia-how-oulu-...
I am dreading New York City reopening because everyone is just going to drive to the city instead of taking public transportation. And it was already overrun with cars.
> Underused stations on expensive tracks are one of the many reasons France’s vaunted rail system is insolvent, subsisting on life support from the state. Rail operator SNCF runs an annual deficit of 3 billion euros despite receiving 14 billion euros of public subsidies annually—just under half the defense budget. Its debt, at 45 billion euros, equals the national debt of New Zealand.
Secondly, it makes it hard for me to read because it's light-colored text on light background. So knock it off.
The high-speed axes like Paris<->Marseille or the Paris<->Bordeaux are definitely not underused and the tickets are quite expensive, often more so than plane tickets but trains are generally a lot more comfortable and convenient (and about as fast or even faster door-to-door).
More broadly the problem is whether you consider that the SNCF should be run uniquely for-profit (in which case they'd probably end up closing all the small regional lines and only run the bullet trains) or if it's a public service that can lose money if it provides an important service for the citizens (in which case it makes sense to maintain the local lines even if they lose a lot of money).
High speed rail would work on the coasts and in specific intercity regions. There most definitely should be high speed rail between nearby large cities - Texas, the Midwest, and California could really use high speed rail systems.
But the lack of these routes aren’t necessarily a disaster at present, especially when Americans generally need a car at their destination anyway (thanks to irreversible city planning from the past).
What high speed rail can never compete with are flights across the huge country.
The world’s largest high speed rail network in China doesn’t have to deal with United States sized distances. All Chinese cities are relatively close to the eastern coast.
And all Chinese cities are easy to traverse and live in without owning a car. The whole concept of the automobile-based single family home detached suburb doesn’t exist there.
Even with these advantages, a high speed train from Beijing to Shanghai (about 5 hours) barely competes with a flight on a low cost airline. It’s slower and not even very much cheaper.
Beijing to Shanghai is about 640 miles by plane. That distance wouldn’t even get you from New York to Chicago. Now imagine trying to get from New York to Orlando (940 miles) or Denver (1600 miles).
A high speed train simply can’t go fast enough to compete on price nor time (remember: more time in transit means more salaries paid to crew).
Realistically, you can’t - not quickly at least, and furthermore you’ve got a whole population of people that is used to this lifestyle.
So I’m just evaluating (in my opinion) the prospects of high speed rail based on what we have right now. I think if it was a slam-dunk no brainer economic activity and tax revenue generator, it would have been done already.
For subway connections, there is no physical limitation preventing local transit from connecting to the airport. Cities of varying sizes have direct connections to local transit (e.g. Chicago, Fort Worth, Cleveland). The fact that New York City got this so very wrong is an outlier. And finally, subway connection is irrelevant to the bulk of American cities that are car dependent. Having a high speed train arriving in Columbus, Ohio won’t fix the fact that you need to rent a car or Uber everywhere once you get there (to the point where, if you’re within a ~6 hour drive, you’re probably better off just driving your own car that you likely already own).
Flight delay problems are overblown and dramatized, most flights are on time. Trains can most certainly be delayed as well (usually not as frequently, sure - depends heavily on the train system).
Thing is, a flight to LA from New York could be delayed for hours and hours and it would still beat the train.
OTOH how much more expensive is running international aiports, airplanes, and jet fuel?
Plus flying sucks, even at the business and first class. Amtrack wasn't amazing but I had way more seat space with a basic ticket and didn't have to get irradiated and searched just to get on a plane.
The hardest part about building a railway is the land-rights. You need a straight path from A->B, wide enough for at least two lines and fence. But once you have that then re-using that corridor as railway technology improves is very cheap proportionately (e.g. train densities, train speeds, etc).
The problem is that no generation wants to take on the initial "buy in," even if it gets more and more expensive as time goes on (since there's more property/interested parties along the route).
Just look at the Honolulu Rapid Transit Projects and California High Speed Rail projects.
If you have specific information on "corruption" then you can update the Wikipedia article on the project here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Pro...
It seems like you're trying to make a connection here, but it's not clear what it would be.
I'm really hoping not, since Foreflight is my favorite app for aviation and up until now has been doing a great job of adding new functionality.
Not sure how it's not the reason? (Or, at least a major reason?)
I think there's two things going on:
1. The long-term vision at Boing: the investment in R&D, etc.
2. The short-term cashflow issues.
No amount of vision is going to save you from the cashflow crunch that a 96% drop in air travel is going to cause. [1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/airline-passengers-d...
To put this a different way: How could Boing have positioned itself to handle a dramatic drop in orders?
Feel pretty sure that in those 12k people fired were some of the most competent people at Boeing, while some of those better at politics were retained.
Will America’s economic system have finally met its match with COVID, or will they be churning along with lower unemployment numbers than the EU as they have post-2007/8 pre-COVID?
They have a reputation for building a 'company within the company' for new plane models, which basically means there's a lot of vertical integration that goes on, and you will know a great deal about one airplane but maybe not much about any of the others. At the height of each cycle they have far more people than they can sustain. They seem like a huge company but they're market cap isn't that high. Yes, they have a bigger market cap than Detroit, but it's also been over 10 years since Apple had enough money its war chest to buy Boeing for cash.
So when a plane hits pre-production they start to get an itchy trigger finger. They get rid of the idiots and the non-essential people, and the non-essential people can hop onto the next thing in a couple of years.
There's a graph in this article that illustrates:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/in-go...
They hired like mad for the 787, then did a round of R & D layoffs a while after the first flight. If I'm not mistaken the rampup of staff after that was to build all of the -8 planes which were basically redesigning their other planes with 787 tech.
So it seems the new triple-7 flew in January, so yep, time to trim again. Meanwhile all of those people on the 737-Max are probably furloughed, or retraining on another assembly line, and there would not be an infinite supply of those even without Covid.
It might be more noteworthy to look at how many people haven't been laid off in a lockdown situation. A long time ago, the powers that be in Washington state looked at traffic patterns around Puget Sound and realized that Boeing commuters were a large percentage of this traffic. Boeing has offices all over King County, but the project you work on might be at an office across town, and you might pass several offices on your way to work.
So they made a tax deal with Boeing to divert traffic rather than building more roads. My understanding is that as part of that Boeing allowed people to work from other branch offices, and while working from home wasn't encouraged, some bosses would let you get away with 1 day a week telecommuting. And I'm not sure when 4x10 and 9x9 schedules (four day workweek, 10 hours a day, or 9 day fortnight, 9 hours a day) came in, but those helped too.
Conference call software de rigeur, and whole disk encryption since before it was cool. There are a lot of quite old building blocks in place for at least some departments to keep working without being in the same room.
What does that mean? What's the difference between "time employed" and "duration of employment"?
A lot of old companies had benefit carrots designed to keep you from leaving, so those benefits come on work anniversaries, rather than cumulative years of service. If you leave at 4 years to start your own company and then get bought or come back, tough luck, you start over.
If you worked at Boeing off and on for your whole career you'd still be in the pension program, even if you kept leaving every 4 years to do something else.
And chances of that vaccine working _reliably_ are pretty slim: we do not have vaccines for any other coronaviruses, and they mutate. Our vaccines against the flu (which is not a coronavirus, but which also mutates) leave a lot to be desired.
If it's a horse rase, the plough horse is neck-and-neck with the thoroughbred.
You can view the event in VR using Bigscreen! Today at 1:30 PST
Pop on your Quest, search for "Bigscreen" (it's called Bigscreen (Beta)) ... Then show up at 1:30!
If you're referring to SpaceX winning the launch contract over Boeing, that happened a while ago, and has no connection to the pandemic or this layoff.
Congratulations to SpaceX for their accomplishment today, but it's neither here nor there for the topic of this article.
Their problems in commercial aviation are undoubtedly worse and the bigger reason for this layoff, but another major division struggling certainly didn't improve Boeing's situation.
To connect the current layoffs at Boeing to the competition in the commercial space launch industry really seems to be motivated reasoning that focuses on irrelevant minutiae while the whale in the room is the impact of the pandemic.
But that's because there are so many other travelers. Conditional on survival, travel is looking more appealing post-COVID.
That necessarily implies that fewer people should be able to travel.
On the other hand, events with friends, lovers, annual festivals (yacht weeks, film festivals, music festivals), getting immersed somewhere else so long that you take classes and go about the day to day with others in the class, actually enjoying taking cross country trains because they are a fast and viable form of transportation. Can't wait till that is viable again! Many of those things are possible in the US, many of the events are just not in the US and their original locations are better for it, there are also lots of people not interested or capable of coming here, who I like to be around.
This seems overly myopic to me. Aviation accounts for at most 2% of global juman CO2 emissions during normal years. I think you could come up with dozens of arguments for why it’s a net good. For example, tourism has income allows small island nations to better financially prepare for rising sea levels far in excess of aviations contribution to sea level rise. Not only that, but travel exposes citizens of wealthy nations to the real living conditions of people in developing nations, which can have a number of positive political effects.
You could probably make that up by driving less, since a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. If you look at the UK, it's estimated that 20% of the nation's emissions are directly from heating and hot water, which is analogous to many areas of the US. This is largely due to old and poorly insulated housing stock.
This isn't meant to be CO2 whataboutism, but rather to compare meaningful individual contributions to emissions. IMO aviation for most international travelers may be a large single contribution, but they do it infrequently and other activities could be moderated of modified to make up ground. I mention this to support my parent claim that aviation has numerous benefits, and they may likely outweigh their costs accounting for externalities. That said, I would advocate a carbon tax that prices emissions into things like gas, heating, flying, etc.
http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full...
There's really no budget for burning kerosene if we are serious about the 1.5 degree target. The only way I see aviation being compatible is if there is a massive breakthrough in biofuels or battery technology.
[1]https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15...
What about taking a normal person and not an American? Even compared to other developed, Western-type nations, the US emissions are terribly high (only matched by the other 2 large Anglo-Saxon colonies); but triple of UK and France per capita emissions. And those 2 are already over the emission budget.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
the arguments you gave are not that compelling. air travel doesn't need to disappear entirely, but the environment would benefit from having it be a good bit more expensive. part of this could be increased airport fees to help the island nations recoup some of the revenue.
> Not only that, but travel exposes citizens of wealthy nations to the real living conditions of people in developing nations, which can have a number of positive political effects.
maybe so, but I doubt you could measure this with enough confidence to use as a basis for policy.
However, there are tons of economies that rely on tourism to function. There is no clear way to make up for that in the short to medium term. It's generally agreed that economies need to decarbonize energy production ASAP, and that takes money which has to come from somewhere. For many economies less air travel directly means a diminished ability to decarbonize energy.
Now let's turn our focus to the nations that originate the travel in question. These places generate a lot of economic activity from travel as well. Now laid off employees of Boeing do not pay income taxes, and use public money in the from of unemployment services. If they were still employed their taxes could go to any number fo climate initiatives, their pay checks could purchase more efficient vehicles, and they could retrofit their homes.
Diminished economic activity doesn't position any nation to take active measures towards climate change mitigation.
It doesn't surprise me that the HN crowd lacks the empathy to see the damage being done here, but say for instance someone told you couldn't code anymore, you lose your job, and you might have to pivot into another industry at a time when nobody's hiring and you don't even have the skills or training to get in the door. Then some pompous asshole online says "well ackchually this is good for the environment because computers consume energy and don't run off of the hot air I blow everytime I open my mouth"
I would be a huge fan of Medicare for All and more robust safety nets resulting from this carnage, but I don't expect it. People are irrational and selfish in aggregate, and when times are good they are entirely apathetic to the political process. Only under duress do they scream "do something" to the people they've elected who actively do harm to their constituents' interests.
Every industry that dies or suffers a setback is a tragedy, but it's also the unavoidable result of progress, of capitalism, and of any sort of active economic activity.
And the people involved can be taken care of. There doesn't need to be pain an suffering unless society decides that people who lose their jobs because of something like this need to suffer.
And for the record, a close friend of mine did indeed lose the ability to code. He dropped out of his PhD and become a shop security guard for 7 years. Not exactly his dream job, but he accepted it and it worked out. There are millions, probably billions, of people in the world who don't get to work their dream job. Pilots and flight attendants aren't the only ones. I'm all for helping them.
None of that changes the fact that excessive air travel does a lot of damage.