The role of McDonnell-Douglas is exaggerated. Boeing had achieved pretty close to a monopoly in the mid-1970s, but things had changed by the mid-1990s.
1. Domestic airlines protected by regulation had been effective monopolies and Boeing's engineer-led culture thrived in an environment where airlines didn't care about costs. But that environment died with airline deregulation in 1978 and an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.
2. Airbus' rise put Boeing on the defensive for the first time in many decades. By 1996, Boeing's market share was less than twice Airbus' and falling rapidly enough that people could foresee the day when Airbus would overtake them. Although Airbus had good aircraft, their key advantage was they could sell them for lower prices than Boeing could.
3. Shareholders had become increasingly activist, quick to overthrow management when they weren't getting enough dividends and share price increases, and willing to install new management who would give them what they wanted.
Outsourcing, cost-cutting, and a move to an accountancy-led culture were the obvious responses to these challenges and Boeing's then CEO, Phil Condit, had already started the ball rolling on them before buying McDonnell-Douglas.
> an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.
I know this is a common sentiment, but I don't quite get it. Engineering is often about optimizing multivariate functions, and cost is just another variable to optimize. If you frame it properly to engineers, they can solve cost problems too.
Agreed. Maybe I have become too much of a PHB, but I find that engineers (or scientists in my case) really love having cost as one of the visible metrics to optimize for, and will generally do a fantastic job at evaluating it amongst quality concerns. At least much better than management can do.
I agree. In most of the places I've worked, devs have always taken costs into account as part of the design and development decisions, to the degree that they can. But at most companies, things like cost, expected ROI, etc. are never revealed to the devs, leaving it to guesswork.
All the good engineers I know will prioritize the product though. "Accountants" will prioritize the cost. The "cheapest good product" and the "best cheap product" are almost never the same. The the latter is what you want to pay for but the former is what you want to have.
I think this is an oversimplification. Engineers prioritize the product, as they should, but what the best solution is depends on the constraints, and that includes things like cost of production, target price point, etc.
"Good, cheap, fast: pick two" is a law of the universe that most engineers deeply understand, and good devs will produce the best product they can according to which two are chosen.
Given the choice between cost optimized and safe, fast, cool, etc very few engineers are going to go for cost savings. If there's no bean counters in charge and no market cnstraints its obvious that the product is going to be really good and really expensive.
So make cost optimization cool. I always enjoyed getting rid of production hardware and running as lean as possible within operational constraints. Incentivize cost reduction with benefits proportional to the savings.
You know what’s cooler than an expensive thing? A high quality thing with higher margins. A very well known and highly profitable company has taken that model pretty far (like trillions in valuation far).
Higher margins are not really cool unless you share them, which the engineers probably did not.
Engineers arent really responsible for these types of attitudes though. Management are. By and large engineers will do as they are requested.
I find it far more plausible that costs ballooned due to an empire building dynamic by management than because engineers arm twisted them into building something "cool". Same reason Uber has, like, 150 people working on a mobile app.
> If there's [...] no market cnstraints its obvious that the product is going to be really good and really expensive.
Well sure, you literally just removed the cost optimization variable. SpaceX vs. NASA is a clear example demonstrating that engineers can do this sort of optimization when it's given to them as a constraint. NASA's rocket designs were all custom, single-use, often down to the bolts because the budget was per-project/launch, where SpaceX rockets were designed for reuse and cost minimization across multiple launches.
Spacex also had the very small advantage of all the basic science being done for them for free. The constraint in the NASA golden years wasn't getting it done cheaply, it was getting it done at all.
Rockets haven't changed much since the 60s. This doesn't explain all of the launches since the Space Shuttle, for example. Furthermore, SpaceX clearly innovated with their reusable rockets, but this is exactly the kind of cost constraint that commercial ventures prioritize which government ventures often don't.
Much of engineering is "bean counting" but not beans. I think that engineers will do some CYA around safety, but they also appreciate the money arguments because they are inherently numeric in their evaluations.
This is too simple. For large endeavors (building a plane) it is impossible to formulate all contributions to all quality criteria/cost and constraints into a technical engineering optimization problem.
Let alone when re-structuring and optimizing the company organization and processes to build those planes at the same time.
> For large endeavors (building a plane) it is impossible to formulate all contributions to all quality criteria/cost and constraints into a technical engineering optimization problem.
It's obviously possible, SpaceX vs. NASA is an existence proof. Maybe you have something specific in mind when you say "technical engineering optimization problem", like a formula you can minimize mathematically to account for every little contribution, but this often isn't necessary. Like when solving physics problems using approximations, you often only need to minimize the first and second order largest contributors to the cost and you'll be in the right ballpark.
This also means you don't need to find the literally absolute minimum and capture literally all of the contributors to the cost during the design process. And of course this is what happens in the real world already, do you think accountants and pointy haired bosses guiding a bunch of engineers are going to find the absolute minimum? Of course not, they find what looks like a minimum from their limited view of a project after the engineers estimate the costs of producing parts and the labour required. Just close the loop without the accountants and bosses and engineers can do this optimization themselves.
I agree with you and you basically make the same point as wanted to make: you can’t just frame it as an engineering problem, it involves accountants and bosses. So your original statement „If you frame it properly to engineers, they can solve cost problems too.“ is too simplistic in my view.
> you basically make the same point as wanted to make: you can’t just frame it as an engineering problem, it involves accountants and bosses.
I disagree that I was making this point. I said it currently involves accountants and bosses, and I'm saying it doesn't have to because you can make it an engineering problem. The accountants and bosses don't have any unique skills or insight here that aren't in principle also accessible to the engineers.
Ok, then I misunderstood, and we can only agree to disagree. I think there need to be people caring about organizational stuff which you cannot fully formulate as engineering problem: setting deadlines, putting teams together, determining team leads, determining how much budget is spent on which branch or discipline or even which part development. In addition, even more technical problems like calculating and comparing costs resulting from parts-Design over the full product lifecycle (design, manufacturing, usability, maintenance, repair, disposal) is not feasible today. And using approximations amounts to making assumption and thereby decisions up-front, where you usually cannot oversee all their implications. Designing complex machinery and shaping the organization which builds them is hellishly complex.
> I think there need to be people caring about organizational stuff which you cannot fully formulate as engineering problem: setting deadlines, putting teams together, determining team leads, determining how much budget is spent on which branch or discipline or even which part development.
These are mostly hacks to get around the fact that the engineers haven't been given enough information. If you just say, "we need product X that can be produced at cost Y/unit and we need to start production by date Z", then this is a satisfiability problem that the right set of engineers can evaluate as possible or not possible. It's fine to assign a team lead with the requisite experience and authority to pull in the engineers, equipment and data they need to answer this question, but then you get out of the way.
Answering this question involves laying out a semi-detailed plan for how to achieve the goal. If it turns out to not be possible within the given constraints, then you at least have that plan to inform you where the expected cost or time overruns are (or the unknowns/uncertainty), and whether that means you have to revise the expected selling price, deadline or you can compromise on the scope to achieve the desired selling price.
I will agree that some engineers and programmers really don't care about this stuff, but I'd argue it's because it's typically not part of their job, and sometimes because worrying about costs and schedules is not an "interesting problem". But it is an interesting problem if you frame it as set of optimization and satisfiability problems.
Industrial espionage does not necessarily improves engineering culture.
When I visited NITsEVT, a big-big-big organization dedicated to adapting of the stolen IBM 360/370 software to Russian language and Russian computer variants - I was amazed at how low the software culture was there. It looked like the only way to implement something was to look at how some American (but not necessarily bright) person has implemented some similar thing.
The whole “adaptation” project led to overall degradation of software culture as compared to 60s, when a lot of Russian system software was an original one. Or so a lot of people were saying.
Is there any evidence that's what happened? As far as I can tell, the NSA was doing it's routine thing of spying on foreign governments and and discovered that Airbus was trying to bribe a gov official.
Maybe you agree with Henry L. Stimson that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail", but I haven't seen anything indicating that the NSA was spying on behalf of Boeing, or even directly targeting Airbus. Maybe I missed something, would be happy to learn if you have any sources to share :)
I don't think secret tech or cloak and dagger business moves are what makes an aircraft company win. it's a far more complex amalgamation of government intervention, regulations, institutional knowledge, and company culture. Things you could never steal with spies.
European countries have had aviation industries stretching back to the 1910s. They always had the engineering. But making a good product is not enough. You have to SELL it.
No what made Airbus start winning in the 1980s was hiring a former Boeing salesman. That's when they took off. Convincing air liners to take a chance and order Airbus planes.
>> According to a European Parliament report, published in 2001, America's National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted faxes and phone calls between Airbus, Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi government in early 1994. The NSA found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official to secure a lion's share for Airbus in modernising Saudi Arabian Airlines' fleet. The planes were in a $6 billion deal that Edouard Balladur, France's then prime minister, had hoped to clinch on a visit to see King Fahd in January 1994. He went home empty-handed.
>> James Woolsey, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recounted in a newspaper article in 2000 how the American government typically reacted to intelligence of this sort. “When we have caught you [Europeans]...we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption,” he wrote. Apparently this (and a direct sales pitch from Bill Clinton to King Fahd) swung the aircraft part of the deal Boeing's and McDonnell Douglas's way.
Wow, I knew national industry deals were murky, but damn.
Another way of presenting the same facts is that Airbus has done business with a country where corruption and bribes are the norm. The U.S. intercepted communications and used them to blackmail buyers so that they chose Boeing instead of the best airplanes.
Exactly. It's fair to say that at the level of national champion industries and state-to-state deals, countries' intelligence organizations are always involved.
Maybe they're doing defense (discovering bribes swaying the bid to another country, or monitoring their own country's bribes) or offense (stealing competitor bid data and specifications), but they're not idle.
I don't mind being asked for a source on a difficult to research topic but this was covered in the mainstream press and you clearly didn't even attempt a google search.
The article referencing this and Airbus is rather sensationalized and cuts off half the quote. This was said in reference to Airbus bribing foreign officials to buy from them. The full quote reads:
"When we have caught you at it, we haven’t said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you’re bribing and tell its officials that we don’t take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and your bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal…"[5]
[5] R. James Woolsey, "Why We Spy on our Allies," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2000.
The source unfortunately is locked behind a paywall so admittedly I don’t have the full context either.
1971: Will the Last Person Leaving SEATTLE — Turn Out the Lights
I’d argue the 757, 767 and 737 Classic (i.e. -300 to -500), all of which much more 80s than 70s were much more glorious.
And the 90s brought us the 737NG and 777 which continue to carry more than everything else today and for that matter anything else ever, other than maybe the A320ceo.
I would say even the 787 is a good plane, if it didn't have major build quality issues because of Boeing wanting to reduce manufacturing costs (it was initially built at two plants, Everett WA and North Charleston SC, and it got to a point when airlines only wanted to have 787s manufactured in Everett, but ultimately the production in Everett was discontinued). And now the same major build quality issues start popping up with the 737 MAX (whose fuselage is being manufactured by Spirit Aerosystems, which was originally a division of Boeing but was outsourced in 2005).
The answer to this is "yes" -- and for details, I would recommend Peter Robison's excellent Flying Blind. (Selfishly, I would also recommend the conversation that we had with Robison on Oxide and Friends shortly after the book was published.[0]) For insight into the deep roots of the broken McDonnell Douglas culture, I would recommend an older book, John Godson's Rise and Fall of the DC-10.
Actual interview begins around the 5 minute mark. Edit: these twitter space voice cutouts are brutal. Probably pass on this one if you like tight interviews.
Yeah, sorry -- Twitter Spaces were absolutely awful, and this particular space was so bad with respect to audio that we made fun of it ourselves in our roundup of Oxide and Friends for On the Metal.[0] We moved to Discord over a year ago, and the audio issues went away. But I thought the content of this conversation was great nonetheless -- with my apologies for the audio snafus!
> “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”
I'm curious when this was recorded, but my guess is early 2000s or maybe late 1990s?
With how Apple has avoided ever becoming a monopoly in pretty much any area, and instead tries to just take the top most profitable customers, it really meshes well with this idea of not becoming a monopoly and having the company rot.
Edit: looks like this might be from Triumph of the Nerds, a series released on PBS in 1996. So before Jobs' return to Apple and Apple's turn around.
That’s an interesting thought. I always assumed they went for the upscale market because that’s where the profit margin is. But also, it does seem to let them pull in a ton of profit while not ever becoming a monopoly or the dominant player.
I think they are only the majority in tablets, right? And tablets seem to be, oddly enough, a bit stagnant.
Yes, it's more than simply going for the most profitable customers, it's about avoiding the least profitable customers so that there's still a forcing function on the company to stay on top. And also direct immediate feedback trhough loss of the high profit margin customers, when starting to fail.
Of course, this could be overthinking a plate of beans, maybe Apple just aims for a high price point and high profit margin. But if you did want to take most of the current profits, and most of the future profits, you'd ensure you got enough feedback to not become a monopoly. You'd aim to take only the high profit margin customers and intentionally ignore the lower profit margin customers to let some form of competition continue to push on you.
From what I understand, their network was overengineered and they generally put out a very high quality product, and didn't need to do a lot of marketing.
They put out a high quality, overengineered, extremely expensive product that, by government mandate, had no competition. After deregulation it was clear that customers wanted a little less quality for a lot less money.
You don't need to do any marketing when you're a government-protected monopoly and customers have a choice between having phone service with you, or no phone service at all.
Reminds me of Clayton Christensen's talk at Google or argument in this article.
"Because they were taught to believe that the efficiency of capital was a virtue, financiers began measuring profitability not as dollars, yen, or yuan, but as ratios like RONA (return on net assets), ROIC (return on invested capital), and IRR (internal rate of return)...
All of this makes market-creating innovations appear less attractive as investments. Typically, they bear fruit only after five to 10 years; in contrast, efficiency innovations typically pay off within a year or two. What’s worse, growing market-creating innovations to scale uses capital, which must often be put onto the balance sheet. Efficiency innovations take capital off the balance sheet, however. To top it off, efficiency innovations almost always seem to entail less risk than market-creating ones, because a market for them already exists."
Reputation is an asset like anything else. It's probably economically rational to build up a reputation for good quality while you're small, and then switch to extracting as much value as you can from that reputation once you've gotten big. (I don't like it but I don't see any way to prevent it being the most profitable course)
It's also possible to optimize for long term profitability.
> There were certain things about the business where it was obvious – speaking to people who had been on that journey for 25 years before I joined – that they were not likely to change in the future because they hadn’t changed in the previous 25 years. The first thing that struck me was an absolutely rock-solid commitment to gaining the trust of the customer, the employees, the suppliers and business partners. Almost every rule or method or procedure of the company was built around ensuring that.
If you're in a stable business like groceries where you can be confident that your market will still be around in 25 years, sure. But that doesn't apply to a lot of businesses.
Precisely. Who accurately predicted the shift from long-haul, high-capacity airliners to smaller, more fuel efficient airliners to fit with a hub-and-spoke model?
Now layer that on top of the decade it takes to get a new plane from drawing board to delivery.
From what I've read, it sounds like Boeing completely lucked into it. It wasn't some smart person who could accurately predict the future.
And to be honest, a lot of companies we think of as being "innovative" and having "foresight" are that way. They made the best business decision they could, based on what was known at the time, and the stars lined up to make it a huge hit.
Saying that a company can plan for future profitability isn't supported by the facts.
Save for perhaps the development of transporter technology or an unending deluge of viral pandemics, making airplanes for commercial aviation seems fairly predictable as to whether or not it'll exist in 25 years.
To some extent, but your airplane customer has quite a bit more flexibility than a grocery customer. I'm probably not going to buy French perishables but an airbus is a different story.
The question was whether or not your market will exist in 25 years, not whether or not your customers will consider a competitor's product.
And regardless, I have quite a lot of flexibility as a grocery customer. I can go to Safeway, Whole Foods, Grocery Outlet, or my local small grocery around the corner. Target and Walgreens even have some groceries too.
The decision to value the long term trust of your employees, customers and business partners more than short term profits would apply to any type of business that wants to survive and thrive over the long haul.
I think it's the McNamara fallacy taking hold over time.
>But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
Cutting corners on something can save money now and can be measured but the hit to reputation can't be.
Hard times create strong people
strong people create good times
good times create weak people
weak people create hard times
Obviously that's not some magic rule or anything, but people shape their surroundings, then the surroundings shape their people. When played out across generations (or multiple phases of ownership at a company, as in your comment), cycles often form.
Seems like if you do this over and over and over again under different brands - say on like a staggered Decade schedule - you optimize your profits, milking as much out of your market as possible while severely cutting cost and quality and competence.
Completely different thing. The gist of the Boeing theory is that it was ruined by a finance-driven culture that resulted in cost-cutting away quality and safety.
"Enshittification" is not based on cost-cutting or optimizing for profits. It's when a product that's already "perfect" and widely used, has lots of money/effort invested in it to chase further growth, and the changes end up making the product worse for its existing userbase.
4.1 Company starts to talk about politics instead of products in their marketing campaigns
4.2 Company starts to cut cost on workforce by pushing out experienced people and hiring cheap newbies
4.3 As a result of the previous one, expertise drops rapidly and product quality starts to drop
4.4 As the product quality decreases, bleeding experienced people makes it impossible to stabilize
4.5 There is nobody left to innovate. The cafeteria manager is the best path to become an IT director (real case: 3 consecutive cafeteria managers in the same office were promoted as IT directors in one of these companies), so the best expertise the management has is to pick the right beverages for the automated vending machines in the office
4.6 Principles and values disappear, corruptions grows, while internal controls don't even bother to look into frauds less than $1 million per incident
4.7 stock price drops, even if the company continuously spends money on shares buybacks
It does. When you have nothing big to inovate to most products, you need to tell a story to keep the attention of the customers. This is where 4.1 comes into the picture.
When 4.1 changes the direction into politics, you start doing it internally. That leads to the next points.
Boeing, like many B2B companies, is B2B2C. They may not sell directly to the public, but they have a public brand. (Unlike Spirit AeroSystems.)
And therefore, B2B companies run ads, e.g. to sway public opinion on government policies, or (now) to restore flyer confidence in their product. If US airlines get enough emails and letters from customers saying "I'll never fly a 737 MAX again!", that gives the airlines huge negotiating leverage against Boeing.
Gillette was B2B until 10 years ago, but it was one of the biggest spenders on marketing as percentage of their product total cost. There is no pure B2B if your brand is known to public.
I was pretty disappointed in this article; I was expecting a deep dive into the merger and its effects, but I all I got was the surface-level stuff that everyone repeats over and over, without any verification that any of it is really the reason.
As other sibling posters have mentioned, it feels like there was a lot more to it. Sure, the McDonnell Douglas executives taking over Boeing after the merger certainly didn't help, but the regulatory, competitive, and economic environment had changed drastically by that time. I do wonder if the causality is a little reversed: the McD-D CEO taking the reigns at Boeing may have been more the effect of these shifts, a reaction to the relatively new shareholder pressure to control costs.
Well, speaking of airplane industry one thing is obvious - you can’t build great airplanes without money and you can’t get large sums of money without building great airplanes. The survival/prosperity question is of balance, not of preference of one to another.
I do not know why the author decided to “simplify” things. In my field of experience such simplifications end very badly. I guess if someone decided to really just build great airplanes no matter the costs - his enterprise would have ended very badly too.
Now, the question of finding a proper balance, as each engineer knows - this is the question of real pain and real beauty. But - is it possible to write an article about a struggle to find a proper balance in something? anything? Will anyone read such an article? Imagine, how many things should be explained before the problem becomes clear…
Here's what I don't understand: the 737 MAX was introduced in 2017. In 2018, two of them dropped out of the sky, the grounded for a while, it turned out Boeing had lost its engineering culture and its priority for safety, and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software.
And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever.
Why? Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation? Is it really that cheap?
I'm guessing a lot of the purchase orders were placed well before the MCAS incidents occurred. These purchases tend to be contract based, and not something you can just leave with the cashier when you suddenly decide not to purchase them. So you're contractually obligated to spend the money, so might as well get a plane out of it and hope for the best
Most orders were before the accidents but the vast majority haven't been canceled. Boeing has only delivered a fraction of them; they have another 3,000 to deliver before they get to the orders placed after the accidents (~1400).
If you cancel, you'll have to place an order elsewhere and end up at the back of their log. Since there isn't that much competition, this means Airbus. Moreover: this also means introducing another brand of aircraft into your fleet. That is a far greater maintenance headache than "merely" various types by the same company.
> That is a far greater maintenance headache than "merely" various types by the same company.
You would think so, but it’s actually not. I used to work at an airline in IT, and asked that question of the Ops folks when the airline was evaluating switching fleets to Airbus. They said switching fleets or operating a mixed fleet is not cost prohibitive. This was midsize regional airline fwiw.
I'm not an expert by any means, but this is almost the opposite of what I've heard, and the fact that most airlines are either Boeing or Airbus exclusively supports that idea.
In particular, I've heard that maintenance and pilot training are big issues. If you've got half your pilots on the 737 and half on the A320, you're much less resilient to scheduling issues than having all of them on one or the other. Similarly, I believe maintenance facilities tend to be one or the other, so if you've got half your facilities for each, at the margins you're going to have more scheduling issues for maintenance.
There are economies of scale with anything to do with scheduling flexibility, and dividing like this essentially halves those economies of scale.
The only airlines that are Boeing or Airbus exclusive are low costs (like Ryanair or Spirit Airlines) and tiny airlines operating a handful of planes. Otherwise it's all mixed fleet (Delta, Air France, JAL, ANA, Lufthansa, UA, etc.). If you separate wide-body and narrow-body then your statement is more correct: as going narrow-body Airbus and wide-body Boeing (or the other way around) is not rare.
The threshold I've read on airliners.net is at about 30 frames. Below that costs of a sub-fleet are too high and you should aim for commonality. Above 30 frames you should pick the best plane for your routes, regardless of commonality.
So for example running two fleets of 30 A350-900/1000, and 30 787-9/10 would be perfectly rational. But having 50 A350-900/1000 and introducing a sub-fleet of 10 787-10 is unlikely to be a wise choice, even for routes where the 787-10 would beat the A350-900.
> The only airlines that are Boeing or Airbus exclusive are low costs (like Ryanair or Spirit Airlines) and tiny airlines operating a handful of planes.
This isn’t true for the reasons you are implying. Most of these smaller carriers fly to regional airports with smaller runways and smaller demand which the 737 specifically is ideal for (since that’s what it was designed). It’s also one of the most common planes out there, so when smaller carriers are looking to buy, that’s what’s available. It’s not that they are looking to be a single vendor airline. It’s just that the one vendor made the plane they need.
On the lower end the 737 has competition from Embraer, Bombardier (and now Airbus through the CSeries/A220), ATR, etc. Turboprops in general (and thus ATR) are not popular in the US, but they are quite popular elsewhere.
But the specific example I had in mind is Air Tahiti Nui, and its grand total of four 787-9. It’s simply an airline specialized in bringing tourists to Tahiti from far, far away. Hence high density 787-9.
But even a very small airline like Air Senegal has a pretty diversified fleet, of 9 aircrafts…
Type ratings are not prohibitive to achieve once a pilot has achieved an ATPL. It’s about 5-6 weeks per pilot. Yeah, it’s a pain but it’s also not a devastating road block.
Ironically if you hear some airlines talk about the whole point of MCAS and no extra type rating requirement didn’t actually factor in as much as Boeing thought.
Training and aircraft expense is actual minor compared to fuel efficiency and availability of aircraft. If you’re running 20 year old 737NGs the new engines on the MAX are going to save a tonne of money, even after potential reputations damage. It’s all risk management.
Edit: in regards to maintenance a lot of airlines are outsourcing maintenance to bigger providers so that’s less of a deal than you’d think as well. Fuel really is one of the largest factors in this and an extra 5 years of expensive gas while waiting for a new plane may be too much for budgets to bear.
Thanks, that's interesting to know about the outsourced maintenance, that does make sense and would certainly increase that flexibility.
Re: pilot training. I could imagine that going from a 737 to a 787 would be substantially easier than from 737 to A320, due to standardisation in interfaces, processes, documentation, etc, within one manufacturer. Is that the case? 5-6 weeks does still seem like a lot of downtime for a commercial pilot, and rolling everyone through that sounds like it would be prohibitively difficult for many airlines. Plus my understanding is that it's sort of a one way street, pilots don't typically (or can't feasibly?) stay rated for two aircraft types for long periods, so it would still reduce flexibility if an airline split its fleet right?
The 757 and 767 are quite different airplanes, but they were designed to minimize the differences as the pilot sees them. This increases safety by pilots not getting confused about which airplane they are driving in a crisis.
I'm retired from American Airlines. AA had eight different Boeing planes, plus a few Airbuses thirty years ago. By the time I retired last year, most of the different planes are gone and AA mostly focuses on 737, 777 and 787, with a few misc planes on the chopping block in the future. Fuel usage, mechanic training and parts inventory are the reasons for the changes.
"a few misc planes on the chopping block in the future" sounds somewhat disingenuous: we are talking of a fleet of 477 Airbus A320s [1] (family, mostly A319s and A321s), nearly 50% of American Airlines entire fleet.
This includes 80 A321 NEO, and with a further order for 50 A321XLRs I strongly doubt these are on the chopping block. The A321 NEO is very hard to beat on transcon: AA needs the subtype, so it's here to stay. And Airbus knows it: the A321 NEO is expensive...
As for the older A319s, AA is currently looking for their replacements: it should be either A220, 737 MAX7 or maybe Embraer E2 195. If they go for the 737 MAX7 that will make it to 4 types, eventually: Airbus A321 and Boeing 737, 777 and 787. Otherwise 5 types.
No. You wrote something that read as if AA is looking to replace all Airbus equipment. That was replied to with clarification that AA is looking to replace some of the older Airbus equipment but clearly not all of it. Now, your retort reads as a smarty pants chiding at someone else implying you didn’t actually know everything and smarting from it.
My retort was quoting you. Besides, I wrote "mostly" focuses... That doesn't mean "only" focuses. "As if" is only in your mind by a mistaken interpretation. Please reread my original post, this time slowly. Good grief.
Most carriers operate both Airbus and Boeing. Low cost carriers have less diversity and operate either 737s or A300s. Southwest is the only airline I can think of that would have their hand forced in this way.
Southwest and Ryanair were the airlines that demanded a 737 and said if Boeing didn't make one, they were going to switch to Airbus. It's just all kind of a clusterfuck.
I have no special insider knowledge. I reckoned it could be turn-around time coupled with needs.
A quick google suggests that in optimal conditions (all parts available), it would take minimum of 2 months to assemble a large airliner plane. 6 months is suggested as a common time frame. As far as needs go, a plant would need suppliers for all pieces (over 350k by one count for one type of airbus). And you'd need a place where you can assemble the plane, with a sufficiently large runway attached. Possibly in an area where testflights would be acceptable.
All in all: perhaps current suppliers are at or close to their limits, and a new facility would need a completely new supply chain. If not, I'd imagine that if the bottleneck is exclusively with the builder, a solution could be found.
Exactly, the 737 was the highest-selling commercial aircraft before the incident, and the MAX was promised to be a simple but efficient upgrade to that popular series that many already had.
You're also looking over the fact that the purchasers really Really REALLY wanted this plane, and Boeing knew this. The fact that it was being sold as an in kind upgrade so no new training was required was a H. U. G. E. part of the decision to purchase. There was a helluva sales pitch with that fact on top of the fuel savings. I'm guessing there's a lot of bar lowering that the airlines would have been willing to accept to even contemplate a safety record clause
Regardless, it would seem prudent to give yourself flexibility to react to such a compromised safety record. You can always still go through with the purchase if it makes sense. It just seems to me the airline lawyers failed to protect their interests, when agreeing to these purchase contracts.
Planes have a limited life and a shelf life. If you are an airliner and your planes are either aging or becoming not competitive due to fuel consumption (this is the biggest change from a generation to another), you are forced to buy anything you can find. Waiting lists are 5 to 10 years long, depending how big pockets you have. There is no competition, it is a duopol, so many times you are forced to buy.
I’d imagine the plane you are primed to buy dropping out of the sky due to engineering malpractice to be a reason to re-evaluate, if not automatically cancel those contracts.
Unless you are a sociopath and only care about your balance sheet I suppose.
What choice do they have? Airplanes wear out from metal fatigue over time, so airlines must replace their airplanes regularly. It isn't safe to keep operating the same airplanes for decades. (this very much depends on what the plane is made of - so some airplanes from the 1950s are still safe while others from 2000 are not). Sometimes airplanes are scraped by selling to some "third world" airline that keeps operating the airplane long past the safe date - engineers are very conservative about max life of an airplane but eventually the wings will fall off an old plane in the air.
Because of this all good airlines won't operate old airplanes. The few bad airlines can't operate very well because any country with a functional government will not allow you to fly an expired airplane. And so Boeing and Airbus have long order books to replace planes as they hit end of life. Of course airlines are limited to airplanes still in the current catalog, so they often cannot order the model that was working great for them 20 years ago.
> It isn't safe to keep operating the same airplanes for decades.
Me, crying while flying a 50 year old Cessna 172.
Oh, luckily you are wrong this time: most planes at top airlines are replaced with more competitive ones, not because they depleted the airframe. The rest is replaceable - airplanes replace engines more often than some people change their socks and everything else is either regularly checked or replaced based on a strict schedule.
Unlike a 172, an airliner is in near constant use, and subject to much more serious stresses, like heavy turbulence, storms, the temperatures at 35k feet, and pressurization.
Replacing the airframe with a more competitive one is part of it, but part of the competitiveness is that you reach a point where you're having to do much more inspections and maintenance than a new plane.
Airframe life is rated in hours of flight, not in years. So your 50 year old Cessna might still have plenty of hours left in it; I bet planes like that aren't in the air as much as commercial airliners.
Also note that the GP pointed out that it depends on what the plane is made out of, so older construction from 50 years ago can have more longevity in a way that more recently-built planes will not.
I responded to someone who said it is not safe to fly airplanes for decades. I don't think they meant "decades equivalent of flight hours", but the decades since manufacturing date.
A Boeing airliner is designed for 62,000 flying hours. After that, the airframe will no longer be reliable. Fatigue damage is pretty hard to detect. Also, corrosion creeps in.
For comparison, a car's life expectancy is maybe 3,000 hours or so. Airframe quality is way, way higher than car quality.
Nope, but all the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane wings had to be replaced recently due to cracks and Concorde planes were retired due to cracks (micro-cracks, to be more precise). Aluminium does that a lot.
Haven't seen it mentioned yet - but there are several reasons why airlines continue to buy from Boeing - specifically the 737 variants.
- The pilots are already trained (this is a big one and is part of the reason behind the MCAS debacle - new features mean retraining which costs money and limits which crews can fly which aircraft) [0]
- The 737 generally fits easily at a lot of airports since it's been around for a while - no need to reconfigure your gates/jet ways/etc to accommodate another aircraft at your gates)
- Airlines more recently prefer twin engine jets for better fuel economy and some changes in regulations [1]
- The MAX upgrade to the 737 platform was mostly to jam larger, more fuel-efficient engines into an existing airframe to save on manufacturing, certification, and training costs (see first point)
- In the US many airlines have shifted to single-aisle "mid-sized" planes for domestic routes due to deregulation around direct service - instead airlines can use a hub-and-spoke model with several connecting flights as opposed to only providing direct routes with enough demand to fill a plane [2]
Sometime in 2023 Alaska Airlines completed their efforts to sell off all their Airbus and Bombardier Q400 aircraft. Alaska acquired Virgin America and its all-Airbus fleet in 2016, and the Q400s were from their Horizon Air operations. The company sold the Airbus aircraft to American and retired the Bombardiers.
The reason given at the time was the desire to simplify maintenance and parts logistics.
Now Alaska's fleet is all 737, a mix of MAX and NG models. The MAX is about a quarter of their fleet, so the current grounding has hurt them.
I've been thinking about this one, but I'm not sure it makes sense. Let's say that Alaska flew half Airbus. And let's say half their 737 fleet is MAX's. (E.g. a quarter of the fleet, same number they have today.) And as time goes on, it becomes increasingly 737MAX as they upgrade to get better fuel efficiency.
How would this help them? A large % of the fleet is still grounded.
This math is wrong. The MAX is a quarter of the all-737 fleet. If Alaska flew half Airbus, an a quarter of 737s were grounded, then it would a quarter of half, or an eighth. You're suggesting that the MAX would make up half their 737 fleet, "as time goes on", but then that would be true in an all 737 fleet as well. Either way you do it, the result of having some Airbus models would be a smaller portion of the fleet grounded.
You're proposing to replace the non-MAX 737s with Airbus, but I think it would make a lot more sense to replace the 737 MAXs with Airbus. That way, nothing gets grounded.
What's missing from that explanation is that Virgin got horrific lease terms on their fleet because they were a fledgling airline. Had Alaska been the one to lease them the terms would've been much better and the financial benefit to dumping them would've bee much smaller.
As Alaska is based in Seattle, they've been pushing this ridiculous all-Boeing nonsense for a while. Horizon still exists as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska. Their fleet is all Embraer. In fact I'd be hard pressed to think of a time when Alaska was ever all Boeing.
> As Alaska is based in Seattle, they've been pushing this ridiculous all-Boeing nonsense for a while
I do kind of wonder about the relationship with Boeing, with Boeing Field and the plant just up the road from Alaska's HQ at Sea-Tac. Cynically speaking I'd guess that Alaska and Boeing CEOs are golf buddies or something. Boeing's HQ is is now in Chicago (which may be part of the problem, as the article notes) so maybe not.
> In the US many airlines have shifted to single-aisle "mid-sized" planes for domestic routes due to deregulation around direct service - instead airlines can use a hub-and-spoke model with several connecting flights as opposed to only providing direct routes with enough demand to fill a plane
I think this is no longer strictly true. In the early days of deregulation, yes, absolutely, airlines went to a hub-and-spoke model and eliminated a bunch of their direct routes.
But it turns out that customers don't actually like this, and they'll leave for a different airline that has the direct (or at least more-direct) routes they want.
So I believe it's sorta in the middle now: sure, airlines have hubs, and they don't do quite as many direct routes as they used to. But it's also common for there to be direct flights between airports that aren't what you might call hubs.
(Note that the article you linked to in support of this point is from 2001; a lot has changed over the past 23 years.)
I agree. The trend in Europe is actually the opposite, with point-to-point now considered the winning approach. Consumer preference for this modality is actually a significant factor in the dramatic rise of low-cost carriers (Ryanair, easyJet, etc). Hub-and-spoke is obviously still around, particularly for intercontinental flights, but the commercial failure of the giant A380 indicates where the market actually is.
The failure of the A380 still surprises me. Wasn't the 747 super successful? What's wrong with the A380? All of a sudden, now that Airbus has the biggest plane, big planes aren't good anymore?
The 747 was largely successful because of its then unprecedented range and cheaper fuel prices at the time, as well as its easy conversion to a high capacity freighter. That’s why today, with much more fuel-efficient and long range 787s and A350s, Boeing had to quit making the passenger version in 2017 and the freighter version last year. And even in the decades before cancelling, Boeing barely managed to sell a handful.
The A380 had long range, but not to the extent of the 787 or A350, and it didn’t have their fuel efficiency, and there are structural choices that make freighter conversion difficult (like a middle floor too weak for cargo without reinforcement) and less economical in the first place (more volume available than weight it can support).
I think it was a combination of cost, incompatibility (it typically required airports to fix their runways to accommodate it), and the above-mentioned fact that Airbus' core European market had largely moved towards low-cost PtP. The A380 makes sense only for hub-and-spoke, and/or flights over 4-5h. COVID was the nail in the coffin.
Incidentally, this fuel-efficient design is what lead to the design defect. The fuel efficiency is thanks to larger engine (larger engines burn hotter and use less fuel). To make the larger engine fit under the wing without raising the fuselage, they had to reposition the engine forward. This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when accelerating quickly (and this can cause stall) and they fixed this defect using software to push the nose down.
> This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when accelerating quickly (and this can cause stall) and they fixed this defect using software to push the nose down.
MCAS was not intended to be an anti-stall system.
The only purpose of MCAS was to have the 737 MAX exactly mimick the 737 NG's (previous gen) pitch dynamics so that airlines wouldn't have to retrain their pilots on the 737 MAX.
Commercial pilots are generally pretty good at not stalling planes and understanding flight dynamics, they don't need MCAS to avoid stalling even when the plane pitches up during thrust.
The biggest WTF to me is hiding the existence of this system from the pilots, even after the first crash. All in service of pretending that it’s exactly the same airplane as 737 NG.
I can’t find anything about that. As far as I can tell, the optional AOA indicator would also include the disagree alert which would tell the pilots something is wrong with the sensors, but that had nothing do to with MCAS per se. They still had no idea there’s this whole new system that uses only one of the sensors and repeatedly trims down. Even after the first crash they only went as far as recommend going through the runaway trim procedure without explaining or even acknowledging MCAS’s existence. The pattern of omission is downright criminal.
at minute 11:45 , but it's also worth watching the part at 4:31 , where another illustration explains the forces at work in an aircraft, using a classic 737 as an example.
It is on a different subject but the whole video is very interesting.
The reason they didn't want to raise the fuselage was to pretend it was actually a 737 and not a completely different plane, so that they could avoid all the testing required. If they'd just built it properly in the first place...
There was no way to raise the fuselage. That would require longer landing gear with no space in the wings to retract it, so it required new wings, leading to re-certifications of both the planes and the pilots and the associated costs.
This grand-fathering of 737 is the reason it still does not have fly-by-wire in 2024: it simulates the antique original 737.
In retrospect maybe they should have based the MAX on the 757. It's more or less a stretched 737 with longer landing gear. Sounds perfect for installing those enormous engines.
Does putting bigger engines more forward really have less impact on certification and training than higher landing gear and wings to fit them? Couldn't the effect of those wings have been corrected in a way similar to MCAS?
Or was misleading people on the invasive nature of the changes always the point? And MCAS is easier to hide than new wings?
> This grand-fathering of 737 is the reason it still does not have fly-by-wire in 2024
The 737 does not have fly-by-wire? Then how does MCAS work?
The two are probably related. Intuitively, at least. For a given thrust level, a higher bypass ratio seems to imply less air going through the combustion section. Thus this smaller amount of air "works harder", probably getting hotter in the process.
I learned in college that the limiting factor in turbine efficiency is how high the turbine temp can go before it fails. Engine designers get better and better at finding ways to get the temp up. Jet engine turbine blades are really miracles of design and metallurgy.
The same improvements are being made to electric utility turbines.
"The new two-stage High Pressure Turbine section adds advanced coatings for cooling metal parts that will enable the same metal temperatures as today’s engines despite hotter gas path temperatures."
20% fuel savings is massive. At that point your safety evaluations need to consider the safety tradeoffs that arise because people decided to drive cars instead of flying, and died on the highway.
Basically, the MAX has sold well for the reason that Microsoft Office has sold well. It had a set of features that airlines needed even if it was kind of junk overall; it was "backward compatible" with earlier 737 models and it saved a lot of gas compared to them. The backward compatibility was key since it save a lot of further money that would otherwise be needed for retraining and retesting (Airbus had a gas saving plane that would require retrain and this was the "killer app" versus that).
> and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software.
It could be argued it was an appropriate design.
The critical error was in that 737 MAX has two angle of attack sensors that feed data into the cockpit; however, the MCAS software only used input from one of them. In the Lion air case the one considered sensor had been improperly calibrated after being flagged for maintenance by the crew.
The fix is fairly comprehensive. If an angle of attack disagree occurs between the two sensors the system is inhibited from activation.
> Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation?
They don't see it as compromised. The purchase price was set based on the fact that airlines would _not_ need to retrain existing 737 pilots for the new model, that it was type equivalent.
With the software changes and with additional training there are cost implications but not necessarily safety considerations with the model.
The world is very small, and it can't support that many companies making passenger aircraft. If you want aircraft of that size, you have to buy Boeing or Airbus. Both are sold out until the 2030s. And if you are already operating Boeing aircraft, it's more cost-effective to buy more of them instead of switching to Airbus.
China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.
The world is very small, and it can't support that many companies making passenger aircraft. If you want aircraft of that size, you have to buy Boeing or Airbus. Both are sold out until the 2030s.
There's an apparent contradiction here.
China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.
While there is a growing demand for passenger aircraft, the fixed costs of getting into the business are so high that the market cannot support that many manufacturers. Not on a commercial basis, anyway.
Airbus and Boeing are commercially viable, and they have customers all around the world. Comac is more of a political project, as China tries to reduce their dependence on Western technology. There are 1000+ orders for the C919, but effectively all of them are Chinese.
Similarly, the USSR had domestic passenger aircraft industry, and Russia retains some capability to manufacture them. Their latest model is the Irkut MC-21, which has a few hundred orders. Again, effectively all of the orders are Russian.
Then there is Embraer, which is the biggest manufacturer of regional jets. They have been decades in the business, but they have not made any attempt to build a competitor for the A320 and B737.
In fact, their first product, the A300, was a technological milestone, and sold 561 after initial difficulties. The A310 had more industry firsts. The next product, the A320, was again a technological milestone. That was 16 years after the A300 release and indeed about 20 years after the start of the program - but by no means the first good product from Airbus.
Back to topic, Comac is not starting with a bang like Airbus did - but they don't have to. Same quality, slightly different, slightly cheaper could work after reaching governement-aided critical mass. Such government aid got Airbus started and notably did not cripple it.
Well there are only 3 economic blocks that could possibly spend a trillion dollars and several decades on developing an aviation industry. I don't see anyone else capable who could step up.
But why are they not also getting into the 737-size market, if that's such a huge market? If even the questionable 737 MAX is sold out for decades, that sounds like a pretty lucrative market to be in. It sounds to me like if you build something that works, you will sell as many as you can build.
One chilling effect was what Boeing and the US gov't did when Bombardier in Canada developed their own 100-130 seat brand new ("clean sheet") aircraft. They levied so many tariffs that the project was economically unviable.
So Bombardier sold it all to Airbus. Now Airbus has two series of single-aisle aircraft that are more competitive than Boeing's 737 (the A220 and A320.)
One can imagine how bad things must be behind the scenes if with that level of protectionism and political security deals backing the planes are grounded constantly. In working capitalism it's not the csuits that decide to make a great product, it's the competitive situation that forces everyones hand. Imagine Boeing as a ussr state owned conglomerate, who's directors try to game the metrics of the boss for a promotion. And we all know how that journey ended.
For the same reason Boeing developed the 737 MAX instead of a completely new model. The fixed costs are too high, the risks are too high, and the profit margins are too low. If it takes 10-15 years to develop a new plane, several years to ramp up production, and several years beyond that to break even, it does not make sense as a business. If you think it purely as an investment, there are always better uses for your money.
Wasn't a significant part of Boeing's decision to "recycle" the 737 time-to-market? Sure, they saved a bunch of money not designing a new plane, but they were also under heavy threat from the A320neo and needed to get something out there relatively quickly.
These are not in any way competitors to A320 and B737.
They are much smaller, with 2-2 seating, compared to 3-3 in the bigger jets. There are some routes and airlines where these are competitive; but they are not similar planes.
Mea culpa. Mostly. I relied on Wikipedia's characterization of the E2 series as similar to the Bombardier CSeries which was the subject of the American tariffs you reference. But the CSeries in fact became the A220, significantly smaller than the A320, so neither would it have been in the same category as the 737.
Both the E2 195 and the CSeries are well above the threshold of 100 passengers that Wikipedia uses as the maximum for a "regional jet", with the former holding up to 146 passengers and the latter up to 160. However, this is well behind the 737 MAX at 220 passengers. This classification apparently varies by source; 49 USC 41714 considers the maximum to be 71 passengers, while some sources take a threshold as high as 150 seats.
In any case, Embraer has gradually ramped up the maximum seating capacity on its planes, though you correctly point out that it has yet to take the middle-seat plunge.
So is Boeing! Companies without this massive amount of government support either barely survive on a tiny niche or fall over before actually shipping products.
It's fine that governments have decided to prop up these industries in their own ways, of course. Just hard to expect "free market" participants to show up and take on such a capital intensive industry
Up until recently there was also Bombardier, but it seems like they basically bankrupted themselves and ceded all of their commercial plane production to Airbus. Now they just do business jets.
China, a country with the biggest industrial GDP (ie not services or agriculture), spent 15 years on R&D to deliver so far only 4 airframes of an airliner that is technically behind comparable Boeing and Airbus airliners.
So not really a contradiction unless you are reading it too literally.
China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering
mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.
ahahahahahahahahahahah
no.
Since 2022 Comac has delivered a grand total of four C919s. The only non-Chinese airline to order any is owned by a rich Chinese guy. The rest are Chinese airlines that have been browbeaten into ordering some. Nobody outside of China is in any rush to order a Comac anything because:
1.) Comac hasn't gotten any non-Chinese certification
2.) Comac's support infrastructure is even weaker than Sukhoi and Bombardier (both of whom struggled to sell and support their aircraft that were actually certified in the west).
True on all counts but it probably won't be long until it sells well. The Chinese government is throwing a lot of money behind it and even if the US doesn't certify it for political reasons, there is a huge global market starving for fresh air frames.
I think would not be exactly political. The part where the plutocracy benefits the interests of a few pockets would certainly be political, but by other part, the major aircraft manufacturers in the EU and the UE, build civil aircraft as well as military ones.
As I understand it, to torpedo these companies by dumping prices would be to indirectly torpedo the EU's and the UE's defense aircraft production. A cost based production battle would be never won against China. And I guess many taxes would be earmarked to counteract this, again.
By other side, the rampant lack of quality in Chinese products and the inability to produce enough planes if they were contracted, in my guess would translate into the quick construction of factories with the worst production quality yet to be seen, for to feed the dumping.
The matter is, in such scenario we as consumers would be deeply affected, as civil aircraft manufacturing is already at the limit of what can be done without compromising safety (seriously, some managers should have been fired a few years ago, The aim should not be to imitate the lack-quality of the Chinese industry).
I don't want to think about what would happen if a race to cut manufacturing costs were endemically launched in the civil aircraft sector. As European I don't want to see it. If it were, lets say, the Japanese industry, the high quality one, not the one that is offshoring production to China, I wouldn't be worried about it or comment on it.
This is mere guessing, I'm not in the sector (It would be interesting to find objective researches on this matter in fact).
Why do you assume out of hand they would be low quality? We see in other industries, such as the Chinese military industry, that they are capable of producing a lot of high quality air frames. Their stealth J-20 has never had an accident in the 13 years it's been flying and they are building 120 per year, and flying them tens of thousands of hours per year.
You can look at other models. Their Xian Y-20 freighter has also never had an accident and flies tens of thousands of hours per year.
This isn't 1992 anymore where the only things coming out of China are plastic molded injection crap.
Why do you assume out of hand they would be low quality?
The short answer? Peers and past performance as a predictor of the future. Transport aircraft are way more complex and held to higher standards than military aircraft. Or look at where the SSJ100, SpaceJet, ARJ-21 and C919 are today. COMAC's delivered four C919s in three years and has yet to get EASA or FAA certification. Most of the C919 orders are from big Chinese banks or leasing companies with no clear interest from airlines (domestic or foreign).
The military ones are Russian engineering assisted, iirc. The ones we should look at for airlines would be the Comac C919 ( and progressively C929 and C939).
> Launch airline China Eastern’s tentative February 28 entry-into-service date never materialized [..]
> After regularly operating as part of its route proving, the aircraft appeared to change tempo on February 2. The aircraft flew a half dozen more short flights before February 27 then sat for nearly a month before being ferried from Hongqiao to nearby Pudong on March 23 when it was last seen. There’s been no definitive explanation for the jet’s return to the manufacturer.
Apparently they didn't copied well the stolen designs from American and European manufacturers[1] or there was a quality issue with the delivered aircraft. I think the Chinese government wants EU approval to use European citizens as alpha-testers.
> China Eastern Airlines (600115.SS) said on Thursday it will buy another 100 C919 airplanes in a deal worth $10 billion at list prices, in what would be the largest ever order for the jet made by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC).
> The state-owned carrier said it had received a "substantial discount" for the deal and that the planes will be delivered in batches from 2024 to 2031. The list price for the C919 is $99 million but aircraft can be sold at discounts of up to 50%, especially for new models.
50% of the EU and the UE aircraft prices. It should be expected prices dumping, the same that happened when Hawuei and ZTE was subsidizing antennas and selling equipment at lower prices than manufacturing costs in the European Union.
Well a lot of them didn't fall out of the sky and were used like millions of times, and the reason a few of them did was ostensibly fixed so now the chances of them falling out of the sky is even less than when most of them already weren't.
the need for MCAS in the first place is a major design flaw and results in additional failure modes that other aircraft do not have. the "fix" was to prioritize human inputs over MCAS, making these planes more vulnerable to human error. still worth avoiding IMHO.
MCAS is not strictly needed; the planes would fly fine without it, and pilots would be able to handle things just fine. MCAS only exists to make the MAX's flight characteristics more similar to 737NG.
>the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever... WHY?
in most industries, the fat part of the market is the lower end, so your smallest cheapest product is your biggest seller. McDonalds sells more regular hamburgers than they do Big Macs. BMW sells more 3 series than they do 7 series.
There are many other factors that go into selecting the brand of the next plane you buy than simply "zomg they made a mistake".
Boeing still has a leading technology and engineering position in the aerospace field, and their product line overall is a very good fit for what many carriers need to buy. This problem of some loose bolts is easily remedied, and is just not a dealbreaker. despite an exaggerated title, TFA is very light on making any case that there's a set of deep problems inside Boeing that rise to any level of statistical significance. A software problem and some loose bolts.
The door plug falling out is a mistake.
The MCAS crashes were caused by criminal negligence and outright fraud driven by money concerns.
The plane may be OK after the fixes and now when the pilots are no longer (?) being actively misled by Boeing, so perhaps no need to scrap the whole fleet.
There was also a pilot training issue, in that of the 3 crews that experience MCAS failure, only one of them thought to turn off the trim system (and landed safely).
> had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software
The problem was not the aerodynamic design. It was the software that granted too much authority to the MCAS system and the MCAS system relying on a single sensor.
Both those problems have been fixed.
A further problem was two crews not remembering how to deal with runaway stabilizer trim (it's supposed to be a "memory item").
Generally what is in the popular press about the MAX is wrong.
Because for the airlines, their ONLY other option is to put themselves on the end of a very long waiting list with Airbus.
Yes, Embraer, Sukhoi, Bombardier, and Mitsubishi have/had limited offerings but only in very select configurations. None sell an A321/737 equivalent.
So, the airlines bet that Boeing is not going to keep selling deadly airplanes, and will fix the Max, and they can keep their place in line.
It's a problem that the airline manufacturing industry is a duopoly but interestingly, it doesn't seem like the market can support more than a small number of players. Despite the fact that the airline industry has exploded and demand for new airplanes has grown with it, certain econonomies of manufacturing have meant that a lot of mergers and bankruptcies and consolidation happened.
Because there are only two manufacturers. It's impossible to get significant A321 delivered within the next decade as Airbus is (rightfully) sold out for most of their production.
Also it's extremely simpler for a 737 airline (the biggest being Southwest in the US and Ryan Air in the EU) to put another 737 in their arsenal rather than switch to a different manufacturer's plane. Anything from in-house maintenance to training to rostering to having the right type-rated pilots etc is easier for those cheaply run airlines to do when they're running just one type of aircraft.
Why airlines still order 737s at this point is beyond me. I guess some value having every type of aircraft in their arsenal for just-in-case one gets grounded while other airline groups are just caring about getting the cheapest thing (Lufthansa)
It's like enterprise software - the product and sales managers are just giving the high-paying customers what they demand. And it works for sales. It does not result in a good design though.
(Of course, I'm an engineer ... I don't know how to sell a good design to big pockets, I just know why the technical design sucks ...)
The fuel economy is driving the switch. The 737MAX was created to compete with the a320neo. For airlines, especially with rising fuel prices, even a small % improvement in fuel efficiency gives huge returns.
An engineer isn't the golden ticket to run every kind of job best.
In fact I wouldn't think an airline is the kind of company that needs nor should have an engineer at the helm. They're a transportation/marketing company, not a manufacturing company.
An airline markets a flight to a public which they perform on leased or purchased third party equipment based on negotiated route pairs/airport slots in a competitive market environment.
Even their 'digital' offerings are mostly outsourced (GDS, website/app, in-flight-entertainment) as they have low core competency in that, nor do they need to.
>An engineer isn't the golden ticket to run every kind of job best.
Even for an engineering-heavy company, an engineer running it doesn't necessarily work out. The last time Intel had an engineer as CEO, it was a disaster.
This article doesn't cite sources but it seems to be just repeating every point made in the netflix doc Downfall - including the joke about McDonnell Douglas buying Boeing with Boeing's money.
My friend also recommends the book Flying Blind which I haven't read yet, but both seem like better info sources than the linked article.
> the joke about McDonnell Douglas buying Boeing with Boeing's money
I used to work in aerospace adjacent to Boeing and their competitors and suppliers. This joke was oft repeated by everyone in the industry 10-15 years ago, maybe longer.
I grew up in the Seattle area, and Boeing's move of all the executives to Chicago always seemed crazy.
You have these massive manufacturing plants, including the worlds largest building, and tons of aircraft engineering talent built over 100 years in Everett. On the other hand, all of the executives are 2000 miles away? How on earth do they keep an eye on what's going on? The answer apparently is that they don't!
Also, they have been trying to move more manufacturing to South Carolina to avoid paying union wages... but again, there's over a century of experience building aircraft in the Puget Sound, and you can't easily replicate that elsewhere. There were constant stories of aircraft assembled in South Carolina being shipped to Everett where all of the work had to be redone, because everything was done wrong the first time.
Would you feel safe flying in a plane like that? You just have to hope the Everett workers caught everything the South Carolina workers screwed up.
But there are now several serious safety issues. The 2 crashes killing hundreds in 2018. The quality issues with the manufacturing of the pressure bulkheads with "snowman" holes thst had to be fixed or the rudder bolts that thst hold the assembly to the fuselage that an employee noticed that weren't the same as the spec drawings?
There are probably more cases...
With the multiplication of these problems. It's obviously a systemic issue and a corporate culture that doesn't put as much importance on safety.
Ho and there's this one where Boeing is asking the FAA for a safety exemption so they can ship planes faster while they try and fix the problem...
This also presumes that an engineering-driven Boeing would have even built the 737 MAX in the first place. In all likelihood, they would have stayed the course in building a new middle-market, narrow body aircraft rather than continuing to retrofit the aging 737 airframe.
That's the real counterfactual here. Would Boeing have iterated yet again on the 737, or would they have done a clean sheet design instead?
Yeah, agreed, it makes intuitive sense and also neatly fits an emotional "finance bad" story, but shouldn't we then also expect the 787 to have similar problems? Or, why would the 787 with its entirely new airframe exist in the first place? As an outside observer with no particular knowledge of the industry it at least seems like Boeing was able to produce a high quality new plane more than a decade after the 1997 merger.
The claim isn’t exactly “Boeing can’t make a good plane anymore”, though.
It’s more like non-engineering culture resulted in a push to create a new plane as quickly and cheaply as possible. In other words, the execs at the start of the process created an impossible task that the downstream employees couldn’t follow through on. In this sense, it is consistent that under “normal” conditions, Boeing could still produce a good plane; the problem is that nobody wants to or is able to enforce those conditions.
You're only looking at this airplane. What about the space capsule that cannot be built correctly for a test launch? What about the planes to replace the ones the secret service uses to ferry around POTUS? What about the stories from employees saying they are punished from bring up issues they see? So much more than just this one plane (and its variants)
And that space capsule, Starliner, was contracted in 2011 and has yet to be safe enough to carry humans. Meanwhile in the same time, the upstart competition has gone from zero to flying some 11 crewed missions (not all were to ISS) and charged the government much less than Boeing charged, and that despite Boeing's storied 100 year aerospace history and culture.
Boeing had an amazing engineering record, then it merged with a company known for having a terrible engineering record. The executives who ran the shoddy company basically took over Boeing from the old management. Now Boeing is a company with a terrible engineering record. Look at what happened to GE, it was the same style of management that ruined Boeing.
Well it's the way GE was run and look what happened to them. Caring only about your share price is a great way to ruin a company. The share price should be the result of a well run business not the true north of the company. By making the metric into the goal it totally defeats the purpose of the metric.
How about internal documents that were released showing discussions between engineers decrying the pressure received to cut costs by ignoring safety régulations?
The same thing happened with the Starliner, Boeing's space vehicle. Shoddy engineering, failed tests, long delays. Plus there's plenty of anecdotal evidence from current and former employees.
Also, there is this video I watched just yesterday that explains some of the quality issues with their main supplier thst used to be Boeing's prpperty in the past. This just adds to the finance over safety narrative and kind of confirms what this article is saying.
A family friend who worked at Boeing with a tenure that spanned the merger reported that the management completely went to shit and the engineering culture followed, so it does seem plausible.
One of the big signs of Boeings decline is that they don't make much of their planes directly, instead relying on large subcontractors to assemble most pieces of a plane and install the pieces.
This was all done to reduce costs by squeezing suppliers, yet when the suppliers only work for Boeing, my theory is that eventually the cost cutting started to hit engineering and quality control.
Additionally, it hilarious that the MAX was made to save money and avoid a new airframe, yet this decision is probably one of the most costly moves they have ever made.
It's cost-cutting turtles all the way down. Any subcontractor without multiple clients is going to do the same kind of cost-cutting that the main company does.
1. Domestic airlines protected by regulation had been effective monopolies and Boeing's engineer-led culture thrived in an environment where airlines didn't care about costs. But that environment died with airline deregulation in 1978 and an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.
2. Airbus' rise put Boeing on the defensive for the first time in many decades. By 1996, Boeing's market share was less than twice Airbus' and falling rapidly enough that people could foresee the day when Airbus would overtake them. Although Airbus had good aircraft, their key advantage was they could sell them for lower prices than Boeing could.
3. Shareholders had become increasingly activist, quick to overthrow management when they weren't getting enough dividends and share price increases, and willing to install new management who would give them what they wanted.
Outsourcing, cost-cutting, and a move to an accountancy-led culture were the obvious responses to these challenges and Boeing's then CEO, Phil Condit, had already started the ball rolling on them before buying McDonnell-Douglas.