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Comment by bandyaboot | Hacker News Reader

Europe is now the only large scale producer of well-built commercial aircraft.

The hard part are the engines anyway, which are still from the US (GE, Pratt & Whitney, CFM (that one is partly French)), and from the UK (Rolls-Royce).

Not really. Safran are doing just fine in that space.

With engines ranging from civilian turbo props and turbo fans, to military fighters and helicopters, to rocket engines.

Man the propaganda flies so fast, I don't know how we're going to survive the internet. Maybe instead of just shoveling the propaganda forward you could back up your wild claim with data? What are the odds of dying by flying in the current line of Boeing planes vs the odds in Airbus? Hint: It's lottery ticket odds both ways, it's the same order of magnitude both ways.

One airline has a fleet of 737 MAX planes, the other a fleet of Airbus 320s.

Are the insurance premiums the same? I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if that’s the case today after all the design and construction problems on the Boeings.

Consider my comment less of statement of objective fact than a rhetorical brush-back pitch in response to the ignorant claim of European irrelevance.

Edit: for this not familiar with Baseball analogies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushback_pitch

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

China has entered the chat

Yes, they still have a long way to go, but the C919 is flying and hasn't crashed yet.

Eh if Boeing dies Lockheed Martin can get back into the commercial aviation business fairly quickly. They made the best passenger plane of its time[1] after all...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_L-1011_TriStar

That's a plane designed in the 1960s and last produced in 1984. There's a massive gap in development which Lockheed would need to run through. Why would Lockheed even do this? (assuming there isn't a massive subsidy from US government).

Building a passenger jet isn't even that difficult. The difficult part is making it economical - low weight, fuel consumption, high reliability, parts availability, service/repair centers, training facilities, trained crews ...

LMT is the third largest manufacturer of aircraft in the world, after Boeing and Airbus. They've built commercial aircraft before and are the best positioned to re-enter that market if there is a (government-encouraged) opening from massive failures at Boeing. I don't think they'll walk into it unprovoked, but my point is that Boeing isn't the only game in town long-term in the US.

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