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.
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.
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.
(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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...).
And they lost the race against SpaceX for crew transport to the ISS (with no ETA for certification for their crew transporter).