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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

> And one could say, "well that's business, Airbus beat you to it, Boeing should lose then". And that would be fine as long as we're willing to accept a world where the US produces no commercial aircraft

I do not accept this at all.

This would not result in "US producing no commercial aircraft". Boeing has a healthy and growing profit margin. They can afford to vertify a new plane properly.

You are asking me to risk my life to pad their margins.

it is exactly this king of preferential treatment to big players that ensures that there wont be competition.

The only way to rise is to have a full backing of a economkc superpower, basically Eu/US/China

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The overall point is that, even if Boeing can, they can't do it often. And they are basically the only ones who can.

That's not a healthy market and it is definitely suppressing advancement and discovery of new technology that we would all benefit from. What we should like to see is a market where safety is maximized AND it is possible to start a new aviation company with a reasonable chance of success.

The public is not well served by the current regulation environment. It looks like maximum safety concern, but we don't even get to know how safe and efficient flying could be if the tech was actually moving forward at a reasonable pace.

It took forever to even get winglets on most of the big aircraft. We knew about winglets in 1897.

There is no competition because the certification process for an aircraft is so difficult that only the largest companies can do it.

Sure, but I dont think this excuses Boesing's slimy tactics

Boeing was and is a gigantic company, so they could do it and could do it easier than other manufacturers since the FAA is basically a Boeing department at this point.

They didn’t do it because of comercial reasons aka money in their pockets. Airlines were happy not having to do more training, they were happy, stock holders were happy, everyone was happy!

Which demonstrates the problem. When you have a market that only one or a few players can even operate in, that is bound to lead to this exact situation.

The regulations are so heavy and complicated that the best path to profit is to just capture and manipulate the regulators. Which only the biggest power players can do.

So there is effectively no competition allowed here. That doesn't serve the public well at all. We should like to see a market where many more new aircraft companies are popping up with new designs to prove out. Safety as a top concern, yes, but also a path to profit that doesn't have to involve cheating the system.

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