How Airbus took off
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
Airbus uses US measurements - i.e., not the metric system?
Update - google says Embraer uses SAE. Apparently Airbus helicopters are metric though.
"By late autumn, a team of around 200 German mechanics was in Toulouse along with several hundred kilometers of electrical cables to be installed in the first planes. But after weeks of painstakingly threading thousands of veins of copper and aluminum wire around the walls and floor panels of the airframes, the teams had run into a maddening snag: the cables were too short.
"The wiring wasn't following the expected routing through the fuselage, so when we got to the end they weren't long enough to meet up with the connectors on the next section," said one German mechanic, who said he arrived in Toulouse in early 2005. He asked not to be identified out of fear that he might lose his job. "The calculations were wrong," he said. "Everything had to be ripped out and replaced from scratch." --- nytimes https://archive.vn/uLIqa#selection-603.204-617.419
Colour me surprised !
I really feel we complement each other, each time I work with germans they fix my tendency to be quick and dirty and I push them to accelerate and take shortcuts when they make sense.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.
I just remember being shocked by the negativity.
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
I've never worked in France so I can't compare there.
There was always some talk of maneuvering around other groups who wanted our project or wanted to beat us to the punch or whatever, which felt a bit pointlessly unproductive to me, so I did my best to ignore it and try to just deliver.
I did get to meet some cool people, though, including Grazia Vittadini, so I can't complain.
Cf Arianespace.
Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher, the rocket thing is their side show and a way to subsidize our nuclear launcher development not the other way around.
Also ag studied a reusable launcher in the early 2000s and found it not viable economically, because it wasn't, to make it work space x had to have massive government subsidies in guaranteed launch AND starlink which was essentially let our own investors and the dod feed the finance of space x until it's viable. Which is a good strategy mind you, but as a result pointing the finger at ag being supported by government funding as if it was a bad sign is rather absurd.
For the past 18 years at least, France has been trapped in an economic stagnation driven by terrible economic policies (as if trying to outcompete eastern Europe on cost wasn't a great idea). The only thing that keeps the economist from collapsing entirely is the perpetual stimulus from public spending using foreign loans. (This also will probably stop being sufficient soon since the governing party seems to be obsessed by the idea of reducing public spending instead of fixing their economic policy).
We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others), but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
Neither which is the same as expanding the monetary base (debasement if you want to be spicy).
An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.
“debasement” proper is also something else.
> An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.
Yes. And an economy with a growing money supply can experience inflation and having a strong currency at the same time (see what happened to the US and the US Dollar in the first half of 2022).
Covid induced inflation has nothing to do with the money supply and all to do with supply chain disruption.
Not even remotely close to 2020-21 though.
M2 supply increased by the same proportion between Feb and June 2020 as between 2009 and 2013.
By 2021 it had increased by same % as 2009 to 2015.
> and all to do with supply chain disruption
Not massive inflation in asset prices. All that money had to go somewhere, so stocks are now significantly overvalued and housing is unaffordable.
Yes it has, and you show it right below:
> By 2021 it had increased by same % as 2009 to 2015.
It increased faster but the money supply variation was in the same ballpark, when the CPI evolution definitely wasn't (you can compare CPI between 2009 and 2015 and 2019-2021 you'll see that there's no link between inflation and the money supply).
> Not massive inflation in asset prices. All that money had to go somewhere, so stocks are now significantly overvalued and housing is unaffordable.
This has nothing to do with “inflation” (which, by definition is the evolution of CPI).
And the solution to this problem is actually quite simple: tax the rich (who got their free central bank money from nothing in exchange).
Housing is part of the CPI. And no, the “inflation” is not be definition equivalent to CPI inflation.
> you'll see that there's no link between inflation and the money supply).
Making conclusions like that from a single datapoint is not particularly scientific.
I'd be happy to live in a timeline where the Economist criticizes the bullshit that “supply chain economics” is, but if you paid attention you'd be aware that it's not really their editorial line.
> fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s
You should thank the boomers for retiring, not the economic policy. (By the way, employment went up in pretty much all of Europe for the 2010-2020 period while the economy stagnated in most places but the east)
> We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others
Standoff caused exactly by the government dogmatic stand over their failed economic policy …
> but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
It is not, this is government narrative. The “pension problem” is merely an economic activity problem. When the real wages go down (which is did in France since 2017) while pensions are inflation adjusted, obviously the share of income that goes through pensions increases but that's not a “pensions problem” it's a wage issue (and economy health issue).
In fact, public spending per capita is in the middle of what remwins of the EU15 (just above all other Mediterranean countries and below all the others). The reason why the spendings per capita ratio is too high is not because the spendings are too high, but because the GDP is far too low due to inept policies.
Yes, by borrowing. Any meaningful reforms seems infeasible due to social and political reasons.
> Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher
Yes, so we agree its hardly much more than a government military contractor making its money from legacy products and not some sort of an innovative company.
Anything about guaranteed launch is an outright lie. Not ignorance.
For those who don't know, the DOD didn't finance SpaceX or Starlink or reusability.
This claim is total nonsense that started as Russian propaganda.
You'll notice the DOD refused to finance Starlink in Ukraine when they were asked to.
So much for subsidies.
SpaceX was all customer and investor funded.
Starlink was funded by Google and Fidelity.
Reusability was funded via income.
Ariane is the provider with subsidies. In the past it was ULA.
From a European perspective, it’s impossible to look at the current situation and believe it would be the same without Ariane 6, even if Ariane 6 itself isn’t particularly competitive. Sovereign access to space is invaluable. Once you lose it, you hand an extraordinary amount of leverage to the White House. And make no mistake: that leverage will be used, whatever the color of the administration.
[1] https://curious-droid.com/323/black-arrow-lipstick-rocket-br...
Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace.
In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be a challenge.
But in person is also very bad. I never was part of a well functioning multi cultural team. And every homogenous team I have been in was well functioning. At this point I will actively seek out employment in teams where I am only among native speakers and as far as possible only among natives.
>Super sorry
What are you sorry about? I quit the job, partly because I couldn't stand having half a dozen different communication barriers.
>it can be incredibly enriching
I have never found a single positive aspect. None of the multi cultural teams have "enriched" me in any way, most often they made me dislike the other cultures.
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
It happens everywhere under every market system.
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
The end state of unregulated capitalism for a company like Boeing is a “capital-light” company based entirely on monopoly power and relationships that hardly manufactures anything at all, having outsourced everything to subsidiaries and suppliers to satisfy the return on capital requirements of Wall Street.
The Airbus approach is a clear contrast to this. The fact that Boeing has imploded while Airbus has thrived is, in fact, a very helpful counterpoint to reflexive and idiotic market fundamentalist ideology.
My buddy refused to work there just because of the nightmare of trying to certify it all/ensure compliance at every point.
It's because Wall Street demands returns on capital in a way that's fundamentally incompatible with hardcore high tech manufacturing.
Airbus is currently less of a problem because they more recently had huge issues/lost their minds, so they’re more on top of it right now.
But it wasn’t that long ago they were literally faking black box data to cover their ass when their one of their new line of aircraft crashed at an airshow.. I don’t think Boeing ever went to that extent, but I guess we’d never know unless they did it particularly badly.
Any sufficiently large/important organization tends to do stuff like this unless it is actively stopped. A generation or so is usually enough for people to forget important lessons.
In capitalist systems. Boeing is also still a going concern, and is a major competitor to Airbus. It hasn’t ’imploded’.
It is having some difficulty right now - but more due to the entire US economy going through a ‘narcissistic’ phase.
Airbus has plenty of issues a decade or two ago, including very similar issues to what Boeing has recently been going through.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-a...
History rhymes for a reason.
[http://www.crashdehabsheim.net/CRenglish%20phot.pdf]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447] - similar type of issue (likely) as the MAX problems. Improper training + bad sensors + design that is too prone to problems.
Just to name a few.
Potentially worse.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
https://www.eetimes.com/software-wont-fix-boeings-faulty-air...
However, to add insult to injury, the MAX also had another change. In the 737 NG, there were two switches, one would disable automated movement of stabiliser trim, the other would cutout the electric trim motors entirely. This allowed the pilots to disable automation without losing the ability to trim the aircraft using the switches on the yoke.
The MAX changed this arrangement, now either switch would cut power to electric trim. Tragically the pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 recognised the runaway, enacted the correct checklist, but the aircraft was now so far out of trim that aerodynamic loads made correcting the situation using the hand trim crank impossible. In desperation the pilots restored electrical power to the trim motors, MCAS re-engaged and drove the aircraft into the ground.
What are you basing this on?
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
Instrumentation. Not airframe.
Boeing’s failure was in trying to make a great airframe compensate for failings in other systems.
Just look at the anti-ice issues preventing 737 Max 7 and 10 to be certified.
Not airframe!
You’re describing an introduced aerodynamic instability. Not an airframe issue. (Misconfiguring the airframe with non-airframe modifications doesn’t count as an airframe failure.)
Analogy: most Linux kernels are not real time. If I run a non-RT Linux in a real-time use case, that doesn’t make the kernel crap. (You probably used it because it’s popular!) It does mean you used it wrong.
737 Max was fundamentally fucked. But it was fucked because it tried to retain a great and proven airframe with incompatible components. The problem isn’t Boeing producing bad airframes. (787 is also a great airframe.) It’s Boeing integrating terribly.
Missing this distinction misses a critical point about the 737 Max’s failure. (It’s also not necessary to understand it the way an aerospace engineer and pilot might. But then don’t misuse, and then double down on misusing, technical terminology.)
For the 737 to compete with the A320neo, it required much larger engines.
For those engines to fit, they'd either have to raise the landing gear and redesign the airframe to accommodate the changes (which would be a very different airframe), or they'd have to offset the engines (which massively increases the stall risk and lead to the MAX disaster).
This is not an integration issue. There is no possible way for the 737 to fulfill the needs of the 21st century without becoming an entirely different plane.
You’re moving the goalposts because you didn’t understand what an airframe is.
You know, part of the same assembly causing MCAS to exist.
But that is of course not part of the airframe.
Correct.
The 737’s airframe’s excellence is the reason Boeing was loath to let it go. It’s a really good airframe, and a market fit to boot for the transition from hub and spoke. A clean-sheet design for the 737 would look a lot like the 737. That is what makes the shortcuts tempting.
Engines, avionics and control software are distinct components and not part of the airframe. (Debatable only on engine cowlings and mounts. Neither of which were relevant to the 737 Max’s faults.)
Meaning, the roots of the “no new type rating” requirement come from Southwest, not Boeing.
So, how much they spent with the grounding again?
https://engineered.network/causality/episode-33-737-max/
Basically they were looking for an edge against Airbus and a really big one was being able to promise that pilots wouldn’t need a separate certification from the existing 737, which is where that MCAS software came in trying to make the new hardware behave like the existing planes. The allegations about Southwest in particular got the most attention in this lawsuit:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/legal...
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
Oh, come now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.
386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.
561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.
1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.
Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).
But contrast that to the kind of abuse old 737's and A320s need to endure in the hands of less careful operators.
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
I feel like if Boeing shut their mouth and bit their tongue at a little casual dumping they wouldn't have ended up with Airbus taking over the CS100 and adding yet another directly competitive aircraft into an "all Airbus" lineup that Boeing didn't have.
After launching, then dropping, the A380. Perhaps they didn’t do enough customer interviews there.
A380 was also the result of "customer interviews", but after all the years needed to complete the project the customers have changed their mind, preferring direct flights over hub-and-spoke flights.
And A380 simultaneously served as base (in many critical areas) for the quite quickly made A350 et al
I mean, in this particular space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
Arianespace was pretty much SpaceX of the 80s and there were quite a few tech companies back then. Due to various reasons stagnation entirely took over Europe after the start of this millennium. Hard to say why. Certainly not putting all the blame on them (since Britain isn't doing that great either) but I don't think especially the Euro and the EU becoming much stronger helped.
Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.
Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.
There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.
I know the American company I worked for lost bids we had won when we refused the kickback schemes the government that granted the bids expected us to include. Some American companies package/tie deals to other deals with other foreign entities so that the kickbacks happen on the side, but it's nothing like the bribery the Europeans did that we had to compete with.
Stacked charts for two families work better that way than stack from baseline.
My recollection was Airbus had boeing at a competitive disadvantage and a number of factors combined to optimize for short-term benefit not medium to long with severe consequences. So what about that boeing?
> Governments are generally better at supporting companies in established markets where innovation takes place slowly and incrementally. This is likely why state-backed efforts have found it easier to be competitive against aerospace companies than Silicon Valley giants working at breakneck pace
I always finds it fascinating that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft (granted the later isn't a “silicon valley giant” proper) managed to build a narrative portraying themselves as “innovative companies” when they are the opposite of that: they are, and have been for almost two decades now or even more for Microsoft, very close to the complacent and short-term-profit-maximizer Boeing portrayed in this article.
They just happen to benefit from a much stronger network effect than Boeing, and work in a business where economies of scale are insane.
There was also residual suspicion of European industry among US airliners. [...]
Against this backdrop, Airbus did everything it could to deemphasize its European heritage as it toured the US.