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> Airbus overtook Boeing as the world’s biggest plane maker in 2019 following the second crash of the 737 MAX that led to a global grounding and subsequent pause in production of the Boeing jet.

I’m not sure if these are connected but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are. Airlines are losing millions of dollars due to grounding their fleet and the fact that it’s happened again cannot help.

The only thing keeping Boeing in the game right now is likely the fact that Airbus is sold out for over a decade.

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Airlines with Airbus fleets are dealing with lengthy periods of unavailability due to issues with the Pratt & Whitney engines that power ~60% of A320neos and all A220s[1]. My understanding is that the airlines have agreements where P&W will eventually compensate them for this, but Airbus fleets haven't been without headaches.

[1] https://crankyflier.com/2023/09/26/the-problem-with-pratt-wh...

A company I use often, Wizz Air, had/has to regularly ground these planes. It’s always a safe bet to book seats at the front of the plane to be sure that your seat doesn’t magically disappear when you are at the gate (happened last Easter when they sold seats for a 180 seats plane but had to ground it and sent a smaller one last minute). The only silver lining here is that they caught the problems before any plane actually crashed because of them

>It’s always a safe bet to book seats at the front of the plane to be sure that your seat doesn’t magically disappear when you are at the gate

Why? Do they bump the rear seats first?

his 2nd one says they send a smaller plane. it'd make sense a simple algorithm would map 1a1b1c1d1e to 1a1b1c1d2a2b etc. the rear most seats get bumped.

A lot of times they are narrower too, guess you want seats with a low letter too (17A vs 17G).

yeah that's why I mapped seats in the first row into the second :) maybe they just truncate the extra seats instead of move them back. i don't know

All WizzAir planes have 3-3 seatings.

I assume people who pay less and/or are less costly to compensate (adults, people without babies, etc) get bumped first.

The relatively new “basic economy” class instead of “economy”.

According to the fleet data here (and assuming it is up to date) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizz_Air#Fleet a scheduled 180 seat plane would not have been a A321neo and hence not been affected by the mentioned Pratt & Whitney engine problems.

But since the A320-200 is the smallest aircraft in their fleet, maybe the flight was scheduled with a A321neo but got replaced with a A320-200?

This airline went bankrupt: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/engine-di...

So the main issue they have is the biggest piece of American technology they use.

Oy. As an American it's rough to see the state of U.S. aviation.

I'd like to see some SpaceX veterans spin up a jet engine company. SX500 FTW

Pratt & Whitney is a business unit of United Technologies Corporation. UTC merged with Raytheon a couple years ago. Raytheon was already a dysfunctional corporate culture, and what I hear is that the UTC management that took over is somehow even more risk averse than the old Raytheon leadership, which is hard to imagine.

Risk aversion is probably a good thing if you want an engine that will work reliably. But it's not going to produce the next big thing or massively scale output on short timelines.

At least their planes don't fall out of the sky, because some morons cheaped out on the software and they don't have to get special inspections every other week because Boeing forgot to put a bolt in the Rudder, Door etc...

Civil aviation is beer money to Boeing. They make the brunt of the money in military. That’s also where the margins are.

The US government will never let Boeing go bankrupt, the impact on their supply chain (specifically nuclear) would be too big. And Boeing know it.

The US gov might force/convince them to split in two then.

Spin off the bad company?

They could call the military side “McDonnell-Douglas”

They are roughly 40% military, 30% civilian planes and 30% services (maintenance), revenue-wise

Is 50% of services for the military?

Probably less. A lot of US military groups have dedicated personal for maintaining operational hardware including planes that are cross-trained at these large companies.

I think you’d be surprised how many civilians work on jets and how many parts the military goes through. Those dedicated personnel interact with contractors and don’t make their own parts.

They were...

I'm gonna guess that civilian plane starts tapering off with a reputation for expensive groundings (bad for airlines), and for crashes (means the public is gonna be buying tickets on an airbus given the chance).

Boeing bonanza leaves rival Airbus in the dust at 2023 Dubai Air Show with three times more aircraft orders

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/16/dubai-airshow-2023-boeing-or...

The commands during air shows are mostly performative. Boeing probably wanted to cater middle east/asian investors in 2023. When Airbus launched the 320neo, they did the same, waiting months before announcing the commands to 'beat' Boeing during the Bourget, even though Boeing had more commands the 5+ following years.

> Civil aviation is beer money to Boeing. They make the brunt of the money in military. That’s also where the margins are

You haven't been keeping track I presume. Boeing is bleeding money on recent military contracts like the Air Force One Replacement or the KC-46, because they're on a fixed price structure and Boeing drastically underestimated the costs involved.

So much so that for the replacement of the NEACP ("Doomsday Planes") Boeing withdrew from bidding because they refuse to get into another fixed price military programme, knowing they can't predict costs for shit and will lose a lot of money. They're only interested in costs+ contracts, which nobody seems to be willing to give them.

I wonder why lol. Although I will say that some of the issues that Lockheed Martin has had with the JSF and Littoral Combat Ships is that the military is asking them to build something far too complex. The whole module thing never worked out and that seems obvious. I think instead they should have tried for a couple of specific designs that served specific roles instead of building a single ship or plane that could do lots of things poorly while bleeding too much money.

Disclaimer: I'm just guessing at all of this. I'm no expert. Not even an armchair.

That's a "fighter mafia" opinion that's not really grounded in reality (the language of "specific designs for specific roles" is from them).

The JSF on a per unit basis is now cheaper then some 4th gen non-stealth fighters, and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality.

>and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality.

That remains to be seen. Ukraine has completely upended military doctrine of the last 30 years. Dog fights are happening regularly, and air defense has proven to be far more effective than we could have imagined. The F-35 has never been proven in combat, and it's an open question as to whether its' known weaknesses will matter in a high intensity near-peer conflict.

So let's ship some to Ukraine and get them battle tested!

They're too expensive to hand out I would guess (also Russia might start threatening nuclear war again) and it would be a disaster to have one get blown up easily.

They're probably also still not fully combat ready.

Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They might have been a few in the first ~month, but not at all since then. Air defense being more effective is even more support for stealth, which directly reduces air defense's effectiveness.

>Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine.

They are happening far more regularly than US Air Force doctrine calls for, which is never. Posessing total air superiority is baked into nearly every decision.

"Specific designs for specific roles" is a general engineering thing. Any engineer knows that it's easier to get good performance (in whatever dimension you're measuring performance) if you're designing for only one use case than if you're trying to be everything to everyone. Designs that try to do everything end up being overconstrained and then having to make (often irrational from the POV of any one user) compromises to fit reality.

Software monopolies face this on a daily basis. Much of what we see as "enshittification" from a consumer standpoint comes from single products that need to serve the needs of 3B consumers. The idea of "unbundling" that was en vogue in startup circles from ~2013-2016 is just that startups which serve one use case for one customer base are able to eek out efficiencies that consumer tech giants cannot.

I'm not in aerospace or military so I can't comment on whether the JSF itself performs poorly. How would that even be defined, though? It doesn't have a whole lot of competition to measure against. (Seems like a common thread in these discussions...)

Yeah that was basically my thought that perhaps they need a dogfighter, a long range bomber, some kind of thing like an A-10 or C-130 gunship.

Not sure if Ukraine is showing us that some of those are now useless or not.

It must be difficult to design something like the JSF that has to have a vertical takeoff version and all this other junk to make 4 branches of the military happy. Part of me thinks that having two different planes would have made more sense and lifted a lot of design constraints.

I wonder what went wrong woth the combat module concept. The Dutch who inspired this in the LCS are using similar modules just fine apparently on their ships.

One of the issues was wiring harnesses being too close together. The USAF has higher requirements in for redundancy and fault-tolerance in aircraft that may be shot at than civilian airliners do, go figure. Either way, it's not something that should be new for a company like Boeing that's done several generations of airliner to tanker conversions.

The LCS's mission modules were based on the Danish Stanflex system, which seems to be working pretty well. Since the modular mission packages have gone away, the remaining ones are going to be installed more permanently, making the LCS into more of a purpose built ship. This won't really help the LCS though because it was already purpose built to operate in the littorals, which was a role that never really made sense

Interesting. Also, do you think their civil and military depts are isolated ? or do blunders in one can appear in the other ? this would surely cause the US to have cold feet in asking them for more planes.

The rot at Boeing came from the McDonnell-Douglas acquisition and its military-contractor culture of corruption. Harry Stonecipher used to joke McDonnell-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's own money.

Not to mention the embarrassment that is the Starliner program. Now SpaceX has almost finished the 6 launches the original contract included and is moving into a second contract. Boeing has yet to do its first launch "active" launch.

Boeing had tried to get the snakes in Congress to cancel SpaceX's contract at the start because Boeing was clearly the reliable option, we see how that's turned out.

They were probably used to having unlimited funding in the past and now that military purchasers finally woke up and decided to limit spending on projects with fixed cost caps. Boeing doesn't know how to bud with the actual cost. Can't nid low and then go ask for addtional budgets.

When I read up recently on the KC-46 bidding, I found a quote from an Airbus exec at the time saying Airbus won't bid in the second round, because Boeing's offer was too aggressive. I guess being burned once, with the A400M, was a lesson Airbus didn't forget.

That contract was first awarded to Airbus' A330-MRTT tanker aircraft (which is currently in service with other air forces). Boeing was so upset by losing a Pentagon contract that they lobbied the US government hard into voiding the original contract award and re-opening the tender. Subsequently, Boeing placed an unreasonably low bid and Airbus walked away saying they can't make it happen at that price.

So, this was an entirely predictable own goal by Boeing.

> They're only interested in costs+ contracts, which nobody seems to be willing to give them.

"What do you mean we have to deliver planes that don't fall out of the sky? That's an outrageous requirement!"

Boeing is not the only company on the US military market. For instance there is also Lockheed.

And Northrop-Gruman. The overlap in the protfolio of those three is limited is limited so.

Too big to fail implies the government should probably break them up then.

And they've been shook real bad in the aerospace market with ULA. So bad, it's pretty much a given that Boeing is getting out of the market and selling to Amazon.

I don't get it. If civil aviation is beer money why build the 747, the most iconic passenger plane to be every built, only surpassed perhaps by the Concorde. Something has changed at Boeing in the last couple of decades, that has changed the trajectory of Boeing leadership leading to quality issues.

Yes. The merger with McDonnell-Douglas, which resulted in McDonnell-Douglas's leadership getting control of Boeing despite the fact that they had already run McDonnell-Douglas into the ground.

> Civil aviation is beer money to Boeing

This is completely false. For 2022 fiscal year revenue in commercial was $25B vs $23B for defense and losses in commercial were $2.3B vs $3.5B for defense.

https://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/company/annual... (Page 58)

If Boeing concedes the civilian market, the likes of SpaceX could just spin out an aircraft or jet engine business and compete quite well.

How about some engines made with those fancy alloys they've got? Or just a willingness to do an awesome design without all the baggage or need for short term profit.

The overlap between space rockets and aircraft engines and airliners either zero so.

Also, Boeing isn't buildong aircraft engines.

Do you know if they use Rolls Royce engines?

Short search turned up at least one:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_BR700

Rolls Royce is big in big engines. Not so much in smaller single aisle aircraft. Boeing 777 and 787 have Rolls Royce engine options. The Rolls Royce Trent engine family is advanced in having three spools compared to the usual two by competitors.

Boeing is toast, both in civil aviation and in the military. They gutted the engineering expertise that would have been needed to be successful. And now they just can't fix it.

If Boeing’s civilian jets are falling from the skies, I wonder what will happen to its military ones in the coming conflict with China. And if anything nuclear is manufactured to the same quality standards as the 737 Max, then… woe is us…

That's less true than it used to be, due to the unofficial end of cost plus. And Boeing is getting to be a bit of a red flag in procurement circles.

More or less all capital-B Boeing programs in the DoD side are - at best - unwell, but "terminally ill" is also making a showing. KC46, SLS, CST-100. There was also the AH-64D/E fictional upgrade kit and bad/counterfeit parts, something repeated on the CH-47 retrofits[1] . . honestly, peel back the skin on a successful Boeing program and odds are you'll see a non-Boeing organization or its remnants (or Phantom Works, or some other little island of competence that's somehow avoided the All Seeing Eye). And this is just the surface stuff.

BDS never recovered from the end of cost plus' Glory Days of the GWoT. Fixed price broke a lot of BDS, because no one really has any idea what anything costs, or even how long it takes to do a thing. Sometimes I wonder just how much is left in the core of the org.

My first memory of working with Boeing was from 2010, when a government encryption requirement led me down a long and tortured road that ended with me training an entire Boeing team on what PGP was (we still ended up handling virtually all of that in-house, at cost to Boeing, because it took eight months to get an answer to virtually any question, as both call and response filtered through two dozen levels of management emails). More recently the USAF tossed Boeing a softball project to glue wings and a GPS kit to Mk82 iron bombs, but Boeing couldn't figure it out - they had to subcon the job to Kratos (this was in the news, but was also confirmed anecdotally). Similar thing with "avionics updates" for <redacted> - the "update" was just a request that an accurate pinout diagram be sent with the documentation. Again, core Boeing just couldn't manage that without subconning it out; they literally did not know the pin #s on a standard ARINC connector that they were themselves using. Pretty close to an aerospace company needing a subcontractor to explain what the Bernoulli Principle is.

I do hope I am wrong about B. It's quite possible I've just had really bad luck when it comes to the division I deal with. But sometimes . . sometimes you wonder, "What . . what if the whole org is like that?"

[1] That's a huge theme across multiple BDS divisions and programs, from UAS to F-15 and Super Hornet. I suspect it's also why BGS appears to be made of money.

With that in mind, would there be any negative effects to slowly giving Boeing the cold shoulder?

For suppliers, it's a valid question, and it gets more valid every year as the cost of doing business with big B spirals. Thing is, it's just so much damn money up front, that the guys up in Mahogany Row don't really care about follow-on costs, like having to support Boeing staff who don't know what a scroll wheel on a mouse does. Now, though, with (another!) active investigation, possibly one where Boeing loses their in-house DERs . . whew, who knows.

From the DoD perspective? It's not really possible for DoD to offload Boeing. The old airframes - F-15, F-18, 7X7 derivatives of all flavors - are the workhorses of US jet aviation . . or they are perceived to be the workhorses, in any case.

Ah, "perceived" . . there's a huge, ginormous other subject here, and that is the subject of a peacetime military. Specifically, whether the metrics we optimize for in peacetime have any bearing whatsoever when it comes to a hot war with a peer. History says, "nope!". Tech and metrics optimized in peacetime buildups almost never have decisive roles in major conflicts, for somewhat obvious reasons: the enemy sees it coming. Everyone's got countermeasures ready to go before shooting starts.

The victor - the technological victor, which doesn't necessarily correlate with the winner - is the one that adjusts fastest to combat experience. That industrial agility is really the thing that needs to be optimized. Trade offs of course are aplenty here; if you adjust hardware too fast, you damage your production capacity and your logistics. Case in point: the US in WW2 were probably one of the slowest-adjusting of the Powers, technologically speaking, but none of that mattered a good god damn when US industrial capacity was greater than the rest of the planet combined. Combining capacity/readiness with agility is the magic bullet. When historians say the T-34 was the most effective armored fighting vehicle of WW2, that's what they're talking about. It obviously wasn't the best, or even a good fighting platform, but it matched Soviet industrial capability to a T while effectively countering the enemy. It was the best design for the system it was part of. Internet people get in terrible screaming matches about this, not realizing that mil historians evaluate systems, not hunks of iron.

Anyway, I'm rambling now. Short answer, yes. Tons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Aviation

>On 28 April 2016, Bombardier Aerospace, a division of Bombardier Inc., recorded a firm order from Delta Air Lines for 75 CSeries CS100s plus 50 options. On 27 April 2017, The Boeing Company filed a petition for dumping them at $19.6m each, below their $33.2m production cost.

>On 26 September, after lobbying by Boeing, the US Department of Commerce (DoC) alleged subsidies of 220% and intended to collect deposits accordingly, plus a preliminary 80% anti-dumping duty, resulting in a duty of 300%. The DoC announced its final ruling, a total duty of 292%, on 20 December, hailing it as an affirmation of the "America First" policy.

>In October 2017, as a direct result of the tariffs and mounting financial issues, Bombardier was forced by the American government into an agreement to relinquish 50.01% of its stake in the CSeries program to Airbus for a token CAD$1, and would produce CSeries aircraft in the United States.

>In 2020, amid mounting debts, Bombardier sold its remaining A220 stake to Airbus and exited the commercial plane business.

Boeing will be fine.

Subsidies don’t help when people are afraid of your planes

And when your procedures are lenient and reviews are so frivolous that everyone knows that your planes routinely crash.

I think Boeing miscalculated that one, because in the end Airbus ended up with the A220 program which is great for them.

> The only thing keeping Boeing in the game right now is likely the fact that Airbus is sold out for over a decade

Depends on the model, A220, A330 and A350 can be ordered for within 5 years.

Update: Delta just ordered A350-1000s, and deliveries will start in 2026, so merely 2 years out.

Delivery slot allocation is bit more complex than deviding order book by monthly deliveries. Also, custumers cancel orders, freeing up delivery slots for other airlines.

The A320 order book is approaching ten years so, and wont decrease with sales exceeding deliveries.

It figures Airbus wouldn't add a new production line for an aircraft first introduced in 1988 and for which a replacement could arrive in 2024 or 2025.

> for which a replacement could arrive in 2024 or 2025

That's unlikely. They're in the process of testing out various moonshots (hydrogen powered aircraft in multiple configurations, flying wings, open fan engines), and it's practically impossible to have enough data to engage in a new design so quickly. Especially when the neo A320 family is quite new, selling very well, and has new models coming out soon (A321LR and XLR), and they already have the A220 that can use new engines and a stretch.

For a replacement to arrive in the next 2 years, planes would have to be already in flight testing.

Moonshots are good, aren't they? Difference between Airbus and the various Start-Up moonshoots: the former is financed by their existing business activities, while the latter is financed by VC money.

That and switching costs. I'm no expert but I've noticed airlines tend to keep their fleets to as few variants of plane as possible. Makes sense thinking about maintenance etc. Have to imagine introducing an entire new manufacturer would add significant complication.

Emirates with the B777 and A380 models only. Landing in Dubai and seeing that uniform line of B777's was something else.

I remember the first time I came face to face with 777. When you show up to the gate expecting a 737, that 777 is incredible sitting there instead. Normally, you are pretty much looking down at the 737 from the gate, but you’re underneath the 777 and can’t even see the cockpit. It was really surprising since this was not a long haul flight.

I was and still am impressed by the size of the engines of those things. Last time I flew one I was looking down on one thinking it looked more like a small house than a jet tube.

(see https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/x7jges/777_engine...)

reddit comments can be fun:

"If I was a billionaire, I would buy a 737 and upgrade the engines to GE9X's "

Boeing refers to that as 737MAX+

The 777 is a great aircraft. Pilots love them. Maybe the last one Boeing built.

Sucks to fly on though, compared to the A350/A380/787, all of which are noticeably more comfortable.

any airline can turn any plane into a hell for the customers with how they squeeze as many seats in as nearly impossible to do

Maybe. In my experience over the last few years of doing a lot of long haul flying in economy, there's not much difference in seat layout between airlines though, it's mostly about the plane you're on. A380s have nice big seats, the rest are pretty similar. The pressurisation and quality of air conditioning on the other hand makes a big difference to my quality of life personally, and that's noticeably worse on 777s.

Airbus has a significant edge there because they have very uniform FBW cockpits and a very good cross-crew qualification program: it takes two weeks to train from an A320 rating to an A380 (it's by far the longuest CCQ).

Maintenance is probably an even bigger issue than crew.

And vendor lock-in. Airlines have invested in education for their pilots and maintenance employees, and in Boeing specific maintenance equipment.

This is the whole reason for the 737 Max debacle. They tried to keep the controls the same so pilots wouldn’t need retraining, even though the plane was very different. They tried to paper over the differences in software. And hundreds died.

I'd assume a contributing factor is all the defense contracts Boeing has. Not sure how the percentages work out, but guaranteed orders of military equipment have to have high margin.

Or for airlines like Southwest that have an exclusive contract with Boeing and would require an enormous cost and effort to introduce any other manufacturer.

Not only does Southwest exclusively fly Boeing aircraft, they exclusively fly 737s, which enables their unusual routing style. Essentially every pilot and crew at Southwest can fly any aircraft the company has for them. Presumably this gives Boeing a strong incentive to keep making new 737s that push the engineering envelope, instead of making a new narrowbody aircraft.

That strategy makes some sense in the short to medium term, but I always wonder what the end game is supposed to be. Convincing Boeing to just keep making 737 variants forever so Southwest can keep flying a single aircraft type seems like it will lock the two in a death spiral where they slowly become less and less competitive due to forced reliance on an increasingly aging airframe. The MAX is an obvious example of the types of compromises that need to be made to try to keep pace, but it sees unlikely it will be the last. At some point both Boeing and Southwest need a path to replace the 737 entirely.

If Southwest will have to make One Big Decision on its next generation, Airbus could have a reasonable shot at it eh.

I imagine Airbus does have a chance, although like I said in a sibling comment, I think they'll need a new plane to do it. The A320 might be newer than the 737, but it's not really that new. I don't see a company like Southwest planning a generational shift to an airframe that itself is nearly a generation old. Whichever company comes out with the next generation single aisle might end up with the business though.

Other airlines have switched from exclusively Boeing to exclusively Airbus - eg Easyjet did in the early 2000s, and operated a mixed fleet for about a decade.

https://simpleflying.com/easyjet-boeing-to-airbus/

Obviously it's more of a challenge, but it's not insurmountable.

You're right that switching airplane models certainly seems possible, even for airlines that operate one model exclusively. I wonder if Southwest being such a huge airline by fleet size (much larger than EasyJet for example) would make that harder or easier.

Either way I was thinking less about Southwest jumping ship to Airbus and more switching to an entirely new model from either manufacturer. I wouldn't see Southwest going through the trouble of switching to the A320 for example, but maybe to an A320 or 737 replacement. The A320 may be a newer platform than the 737, but it still dates to the 80s (admittedly better than dating to the 60s). I doubt Southwest would want to go through the hassle of changing models just to end up on a 40 year old airframe that they might have to transition away from again in the not-too-distant future.

That and the US government trying to keep them afloat for national security reasons.

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