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> This is the part that bothers me. Why isn't it an option?

Because a few years ago Bombardier did just that, and US government imposed a 300% tax on their planes. [1] And then a month later complained about Chinese protectionism or some such.

1 - https://theweek.com/trade/88867/us-imposes-300-import-tariff...

Selling 6 planes is nothing. It wouldn’t even cover the standby aircraft of many fleets. You need large orders to make it feasible, and you need a strong product to secure those orders. FedEx, UPS and co. aren’t going to fund you long term unless you have a product and you need good teams and good funding to even get you to that starting block.

Boom is probably the closest thing to what is suggested but many still doubt they will make it to production. That’s minimal investment though and mostly around options on orders, so they still need massive funding to get there. Rolls Royce and others have said it’s not viable to design an engine for them so now they have to design the airframe and the engine.

Bombardier is an example of why new entrants should be concerned. As soon as you become a close threat, you don’t really trigger competition you trigger massive protectionism which forces them to sell the design to airbus, further consolidating the market

I think the incumbents would have to be broken up to seed any new competition that is remotely viable. The Boeing story has some way to go yet though, who knows

Obviously, selling 6 planes is not the end goal. But you have to sell 6 before you sell 600. Pre-selling an aircraft or two to a few shipping companies would pose a low risk investment to those companies, but provide a great lift for a struggling new hopeful. Look at how that worked for Rivian.

Your example of engines is an excellent point. Repeat that story 100 times to begin to understand the enormous difficulty. Which is to say, it won't be easy. I hope I didn't communicate that I thought it would be easy.

The story of Bombardier is maddening because it demonstrates that if you achieve unbelievably great things technically, you can still be assassinated by a million other attacks. The non-technical parts are what really seem to make this all a non-starter. But victory belongs to the bold.

And wouldn't it be a worthwhile ride to spend the next 20 years building incredibly cool stuff that eventually fails for whatever reason? Sign me up.

This Asianometry video [0] explains why it is so difficult to develop and market new planes.

tl;dr The main obstacles are supply chain inefficiencies and that no one buys planes that aren't cost-effective.

[0] Japan's Commercial Jet Failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkmtrsE9Jfg

Great link. Thanks.

I still say, sign me up.

As long as we're playing with somebody else's money it would be amazing to try and try again.

>Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000.

Airbus is the only company in the world which has actually managed to get off the ground in that market. And only because they were essentially a state run business which were subsidized to the extreme, until they actually managed to get into the market.

COMAC in China is trying to do the same, infinite subsidies in the hope of competing.

>If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.

It is not like they aren't trying, but it is extremely hard. You absolutely need massive amounts of funding and an investor which basically does not care how big of a money pit your company is.

One major reason for this is that modern airliners aren't that much of an engineer problem, but they are a gigantic management and integration problem. Typical start up approaches do not work.

So everyone else here brings up great points, but something else to consider is that the barriers to market entry are, to some extent, created by the OEMs themselves, by dominating the ISO and AS9100 committees and TWGs/TSGs[1]. This means a couple things.

First, Boeing never needs to take an external audit - they wrote the thing - but their suppliers need to cross every T and dot every I or else they owe Boeing money. In the worst case, a supplier can end up handing over product and STILL owing money. But Boeing - and especially BCA - they have never, and will never, undergo an actual AS9100 audit.

Second, since the standards are existing Boeing process, that represents a pretty much undefined cost for any market entrant. And that cost can be cranked arbitrarily if/when Boeing feels threatened, by amending the specs themselves - as they tried to do to SpaceX in 2010. That's probably a story for later, but it's pretty disgusting, although not as disgusting as what happened to the C-Series. OK, none of those are as disgusting as a million other things, but you get the point.

[1] And, to some extent, the FAA itself, but that's a whole other subject.