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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine who used to work for Boeing said the downward trend started when they acquired McDonnell Douglas and the MD bean counters took over a lot of top positions at Boeing, displacing engineers. After that cost-cutting became more of an obsession than building awesome aircraft. Makes me wonder how Boeing can avoid descending into bankruptcy at this point with multiple major projects having significant issues, recalls, and safety issues.

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Well, the MD acquisition didn't happen in a vacuum. At the time Airbus was becoming a government-backed behemoth, and the US government was allocating all of their political capital and military procurement at MD. So the whole point of acquiring MD was to get more favorable government treatment.

What followed was not necessarily even about cost-cutting - they wanted to spread out the production of their aircraft from centralized locations (easy to QC) to cover as many different congressional districts and reap the maximum amount of political capital.

Isn't it wondrous what lobbying can do?

In this instance, it seems like the government was actually pressuring the government to do its bidding, rather than the other way around. There have been many articles written about the ways the Clinton administration pressured Boeing to purchase McDonnell Douglas (which was suffering from the cancellation of many military programs).

If you have a weed problem, I'm not sure it's worthwhile to blame the weeds. There's a higher level problem here with how government procurement and tax structures works, and just with how incentives are aligned this kind of stuff is bound to happen regardless of whether lobbying is explicitly allowed or not.

The details of the MD acquisition is pretty crazy. It was like an unintentional SPAC whereby the company you’re buying owns you

It's pretty common. Company A is doing well, company B is much smaller than company A, A acquires B, A's executives get wonderful retirement parachutes and promote B's executives. Thus A gets to be run by B as if B had acquired A rather than the inverse.

Apple / NeXT

Google / Doubleclick

There is so little competition, and it would be so expensive to spin something up… I could see it sputtering along for many years. Who can disrupt this? Need space X level money and research, and not sure the profit potential is as high.

It is really hard. China, Russia and Japan have tried state sponsored schemes without success. Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel, and Embraer of Brazil almost did.

Part of the problem is also that airlines have been very good at squeezing the duopoly while demanding ever more. The competition, if it manages to get a plane in the air, usually isn’t as fuel efficient and so the airlines have mostly not been interested.

> Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel

To be fair, that's because Boeing forced them to sell the rights to the A220 for $1.

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

Boeing filed ta petition with the USITC, but it was ultimately the Department of Commerce that fined them for what they decided was unfair trade.

The USITC reversed their own decision a year or so later, and Boeing chose to not appeal the decision, but Bombardier and Canada ended up deciding to not pursue things further.

Bombardier had a lot of other problems going on as well. Generally, their entire transportation division (they also had railcar manufacturing) had manufacturing and timeline issues. The price cut that resulted in the dumping penalties was an attempt to shore up a program that was already flailing.

You mean to say the rights were sold to Airbus, who went on to acquire more.

That's what I said. The rights were sold to Airbus. For nothing, under duress.

Russia and Japan failed, but it's far too early to call COMAC from China a failure.

C919 isn't China's first attempt. But they have a long term view of the industry and should be able to make progress even if they only satisfy some of their own domestic demand.

Russia just got a considerable motivation boost due to sanctions so the local order book for SSJ and MC families will be likely on the scale of hundreds of aircrafts. They are no longer a prestige project and Russia has the track record of building the necessary industrial capacity quickly (they ramped up military production to support war in Ukraine far beyond of what the West thought was possible in that time frame).

I wouldn’t really call it disruptive; they’re using Russian aircraft because they have to. Anyone who has a choice in the matter will still pick the duopoly because of better dispatch reliability and fuel efficiency.

I doubt it will ever be certified by any aviation authority outside of China, which will pretty much make it the tu204 of CN.

Iran might certify it.

Russia might certify it unless having a viable domestic alternative. Moreover, it could reuse parts for its own planes.

These three taken together are already a significant chunk of the global market, each having a large domestic demand.

The problem with Tu-204 is that it wasn't a good market fit, like the current Chinese ARJ. It was certified OK and could fly abroad all right.

People said the same about Chinese cars and they're the largest exporter in 2023.

What if they have not one but ten generic passenger plane brands by 2040?

Russia has a fleet of ~200 Superjet planes which are handling a significant fraction of domestic traffic, but it's indeed not clear whether any more may be built after the 2022 sanctions. They also currently do not have engine replacements.

>They also currently do not have engine replacements.

They demonstrated localized version of SSJ-100 with PD-8 engine in 2023. I'm not sure if it actually flew, but there were at least ground tests of the fully assembled aircraft.

Even if it's possible to retrofit existing fleet with PD-8, I can't imagine this happening at the rate at which the old (partly French-made) engines will be going out of order. So even that fleet will dwindle in numbers in the next years. Perhaps to zero, perhaps not - we'll see.

Embraer does really well though.

I much rather fly in an E195 E2 than a 737 or A320 Neo. Really next level. KLM has these, unfortunately they rarely use them to my destination because they can fill a 737 to there as well :(

I'm sure SpaceX could build a jet if they wanted to.

I'm also certain they don't want to.

Commercial aircraft are significantly more complex and regulated than rockets are (for now). Many companies can develop aircraft (e.g. bombardier), but few can actually get them into production.

>Makes me wonder how Boeing can avoid descending into bankruptcy at this point with multiple major projects having significant issues, recalls, and safety issues.

Boeing is a duopoly with Airbus and for putting in your hands in a brand new Airbus you will have to join the queue and wait five years. So they benefit from the lack of competition, if the merger with McDonnel had never happened, probably this situation would be different. But today's capitalism is all about consolidating and eliminating competition.

Embraer might try to venture in the wide body segment, but they don't seem willing to do that move.

Embraer seems to have the highest standards, or very close to highest, in the industry now. But I think it's unlikely that they'll be capable and willing to compete with Boeing or Airbus in the near future.

I can't help but wonder how successful a project it would be if Embraer built a 757 clone (but with modern engines and cabin). If executed correctly that could put Embraer on an equal footing with Boeing and Airbus in the narrowbody market (and their C-390 is a widebody that could be modified into a passenger carrier...).

I worked with several co-workers who were former Boeing, but on the software side. They all left to start a new startup, and they all said the same thing.

boeing also makes weapons and sells them to the us gov. the plane stuff is kind of a side gig. they will be fine no matter how many people they kill.

They also have a space business which is losing staggering amounts of money due to incompetence.

Their government programs have hit some snags recently too. The KC-46 and Starliner programs have not exactly been smooth money-makers for them.

You could argue, they do better the more people they kill.

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