Boeing won't have failed until someone starts a competing company that stands a chance of replacing it. (Airbus is the same thing, very corporate, very closely tied to governments, but in Europe).
A few years ago, Bombardier introduced a new plane, the C-Series. Even though it did not immediately compete with Boeing's own offering, Boeing successfully lobbied for an extravagant 300% import tariffs to be be applied which killed the primary market (US) for it. Canadian government folded and essentially gave the otherwise technically successful project to Airbus in the hope of salvaging any industrial returns on eventual mass production. The airplane is now known as the A220.
Any would-be competitor will not only be fighting Boeing, but the whole US government.
Doesn't this violate NAFTA?
> On 10 January 2018, the Canadian government filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization against the US.
> On 26 January 2018, the four USITC commissioners unanimously determined that US industry is not threatened and no duty orders will be issued, overturning the imposed duties. The Commission public report was made available by February 2018. On March 22, Boeing declined to appeal the ruling. While the USITC had determined there was no threat, the ruling came too late for Bombardier, as the dumping petition by Boeing had already paved the way for Bombardier to relinquish a controlling interest in the CSeries to Airbus in October 2017.
This is just a repeat of the Avro Arrow story. US demanding free trade from everyone and then just bullying its weight around when someone comes along with a better deal than what they can manage.
And ... Putin has a significant aviation industry. For a while they were the only country able to launch humans into space. And as far as I know, they're flying MiGs in Ukraine.
But my comment was really intended to say that the "freedom" we are supposedly entitled to is actually a gift, with limits, and there are few better ways to discover those limits than to threaten a very large company.
No company is safe. Boeing is exactly the type of company that won't know they're dying until they are dead.
Yes, but they're in a sufficiently protected region of state space guarded by landscape difficulty, moats, massive contracts and cash flows, the government, you name it.
You can't just build a better plane from zero and immediately start taking orders. You have to start with something small, tangential, and then grow into that market. That's still very hard to do in aerospace because the requirement is "don't kill people" yet the problem involves putting people in mortal danger.
I don't doubt that it could happen, but I think it's a very tall order.
Maybe true, it's business profitable, successfully extracting money from airlines and government contracts.