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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

A crowd that is ideological resistant to reality in quite a entertaining fashion. Just remember the Boing 737 Max, which was never explored under this focus. Why does European airbus thrive, while us aircraft industry declined? Both are heavily state subsidized, so it is not that. There is something dysfunctional in us business culture, that extracts value first, and then runs without creating something for the value extracted.

It sometimes is almost reminiscent of the eastern European oligarchs that emerged at the end of the coldwar.

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> Why does European airbus thrive, while us aircraft industry declined?

The documentary "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing"[1] goes into this topic, and I believe the wiki page[2] summary captures it nicely:

> "There were many decades when Boeing did extraordinary things by focusing on excellence and safety and ingenuity. Those three virtues were seen as the key to profit. It could work, and beautifully. And then they were taken over by a group that decided Wall Street was the end-all, be-all. [...]"

Of course, I have no idea if this is just cherry-picking information, but it does seem plausible why things "suddenly" changed.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11893274/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...

I've heard one theory that the merger with McDonnell Douglas swept the bean-counters from there into executive positions ruining the engineering focus at Boeing.

That's what I read and understood to be the cause. Prior to that Boeing had an engineering culture all the way up.

The Microsoft spreadsheet happy-hippos are relying on India to buy enormous sums of Boeing passenger planes is one headline the media is running with, and another line of propaganda is to not bet against India. They say.

>> There is something dysfunctional in us business culture, that extracts value first,

You just said it. When we prioritize the money over the activity that makes the money... We deprioritize the activity - it's at least second place if not worse.

If there was a machine that increased a company's stock value by crushing orphans invented today, tomorrow there would be lobbyists in Congress pushing to allow corporations to directly apply for adoptions.

>A crowd that is ideological resistant to reality in quite a entertaining fashion. Just remember the Boing 737 Max, which was never explored under this focus.

Boeing was heavily criticized by HN in every thread I saw about it. You picked a wrong example.

I can’t comment on the broader US/EU perception question, but I would partly attribute Airbus’ success to its harnessing of smaller scale engineering excellence always present in Western European aviation. Airbus merely solved the problem of risk of high scale production which has historically been a challenge for European manufacturers relative to Americans operating in their large, uniform market.

And Volskwagen cheating on it's emissions?

This is bit of a glib view of Boeing.

Boeng and Airbus will trade spaces for a while, until China starts stelling it's gear at 1/2 the price and then we will see some material changes.

Way to cherrypick - A380 wasn't exactly a masterpiece in economics. Should we discuss Airbus/Araine?

not being a masterpiece in economics is not on the same scale as building an aircraft which is technically simply unfit to fly.

Sure, you can make bad bussiness decisions but this doesn't mean you cannot build proper airplanes.

I think pointing out Airbus is a bit questionable. Yes Airbus does well now, but Europe tried to do these kinds of things in many different places and most of them didn't end up so well.

And at the same time, if we stay within Aerospace, why is SpaceX utterly dominating anything from Europe. Is US business culture to blame?

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