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.
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.
Disclaimer: I'm just guessing at all of this. I'm no expert. Not even an armchair.
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.
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.
They're probably also still not fully combat ready.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
So, this was an entirely predictable own goal by Boeing.
"What do you mean we have to deliver planes that don't fall out of the sky? That's an outrageous requirement!"
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)
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.
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.
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).
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/16/dubai-airshow-2023-boeing-or...
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.
Also, Boeing isn't buildong aircraft engines.