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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

US Gov will bail them out (even if optically it doesn't look like a bail-out), boeing is a huge defence contractor.

The article is about the jobs disappearing, not Boeing disappearing.

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.

The original comment was that Boeing is in trouble itself - and the parent comment was addressing that trouble and what the US response will be.

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.

Yes, but there's more than one way to save Boeing's defense business and recent scandals have left them with less political capital then they would have otherwise had. There's no guarantee post-bailout Boeing would be the same company as pre-bailout Boeing or even remain a single company.

Certainly, but Boeing stripped down to just its defense contracts would be a huge fall.

I'm not so sure about that. Contracts are routinely picked up by others if one fails. Not only this but even if they fail they could partially fail and kill the commercial aircraft arm of the company but keep the juicy defense arm.

Commercial aircraft used to be the juicy part. In terms of actual military aircraft, Boeing now only has the P-8 (success), C-17 (success), KC-46 (debacle), F-18 (success), and F-15 (success). The P-8 is a limited contract, the C-17 is out of production, the KC-46 is just a joke, the F-18 program is winding down, and the F-15 is hanging by a thread. Boeing also sells the AH-64, but it too is a old system that doesn't generate a lot of revenue.

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.

Agree with most of that but isn't the F-15 alive and well? It's not a stealth aircraft but can be loaded with advanced electronics and 16 long range missiles and use F-35s or F-22s to lock targets for them I believe.

F-15 won't survive in a modern A2D environment without a lot of SEAD support. The airframe on the F-15 are also getting a lot of miles on them. I'm referring to the F-15C types, not the F-15Es.

T-7 will be a success.

P-8, get back to me after a few more airframe years at low altitude patrols. It’s not going to be pretty.

I don't think they fly the P-8 in the same flight regiment as the Orion used to fly. There's no MAD sensor, and it doesn't have the range at low levels to consistently hit the deck.

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.

If they get bailed out, the US public should get an ownership stake.

If by US public you mean the common citizenry then no, of course that won't happen. But you can be certain that any public servants helping to grease through the bail out will be given quite cushy positions when they retire. That's the pattern in the US, when something should go to citizens it is instead diverted to politicians while rhetoric about bootstraps[1] is voluminously discussed.

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.

German government got a 20% stake in Lufthansa for their bailout. Seems fair American govt should also take a stake when bailing out these companies.

https://www.businessinsider.com/lufthansa-government-fund-ap...

The German government intends to pay 6 billion EUR (+3 billion in loans), they should own Lufthansa outright. It's insane.

Then they can focus on just being a defense contractor. But there's nothing that requires them to bail out the commercial airline business, and it wouldn't be the first time a major aerospace and defense company made this pivot. When Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta, they stopped making commercial airliners.

Boeing is the only American commercial transport jet manufacturer based in the US. The US politically would never allow the loss of this - whether it be “Boeing” or some new named thing that’s basically the same. For pro-global politicians it would be a major signal of failure of American industry, for “America first” isolationists it’s an obvious problem.

I think even from a national defense perspective it makes sense to retain a lot of the talent and manufacturing capability in some ways even if it's no longer WW2 and we can just launch a missile now. Maybe call it national strategy to have talent in a broad array of fields.

Which talent? There's only accounting talents from McDonald-Douglas left. The technical talent was replaced with cheap labor from overseas long time ago. And then there are thousands of bean counters to control overseas labor. You really need those domestic bean counters, that's their speciality.

Something like 70% of Boeing revenue is commercial jets

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