Complacency - particularly a sense of you being on top in the natural order of things - will kill you, one way or another. No empire has ever survived it from the Romans to, the British empire to, well, I guess Boeing. Business textbooks are rammed with stories of complacency gutting market-dominating corporates (IBM, Kodak, Xerox), and the big reckoning seems to be coming for the likes of Boeing, GM, Ford, and many more. In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there.
The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start.
When you're not totally absorbed by the share price, and instead you're trying to build a sustainable long-term business that can pay off decades (or generations), later, you get to make decisions that lead to a more sustainable and trusted business.
And the competition from Airbus may not make Boeing better either. On the contrary, Boeing may well get into a death spiral and a slow but painful death. What competition really means is that incumbents can die without impacting customers as other more competent alternatives will fill the void.
Yea. That's the other new phenomenon this new century has brought us, zombie corporations kept alive by feeding them good tax dollars after bad investments. We have to learn to bury our dead properly.
Google is already killing itself. The search experience has been getting steadily worse and worse on one end, but on the other, they're slowly strangling the incentives that were offered to publishers (ranking, traffic & monetization) to develop content for the "open web as dominated by Google".
Now, everyone who's running a website for a living is doing platform-native content for traffic and pairing it up with a newsletter-backed website or straight up investing in brand advertising campaigns to have access to their own audiences still, without relying on Google to deliver them.
My guess is that we're in for the second wave of Big Aggregators, but it's tough to say what the technological twist behind it will be, so it's not just a reddit 2.0.
Not an OP, but I think the search monopoly is likely to end within the next 10 years. There were fundamental reasons that kept it alive and all of them are becoming irrelevant at various speeds.
Not that it must kill Google, they can still pivot and e.g. Google Cloud is already non-negligible in their revenue structure. But I'm relatively confident that search/ads duo won't be their main earner anymore just like Windows is not the main earner of Microsoft.
> The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start.
But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. If anything, they abandoned the idea of a new design and introduced 737 MAX as a response to the competition - A320neo.
I guess that's also a natural evolution of many industries and societies, which has happened many times.
First you have rapid iteration and lots of innovation.
Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer.
Then it gets so bad you won't have anyone working anymore who has finished any new projects during their career, everybody's been working on the same decades long projects since time immemorial. Some new ones are started, some are cancelled every now and then but none are finished.
Then the organization will not even try anymore and accept to live in the ruins created by past generations.
Then it could happen that all artifacts crumble, all documentation disappears and even the people propagating the intergenerational verbal history forget or die and nobody will even know that anything existed.
> Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer.
The problem with Boeing is mostly a business side one, not an engineering problem. Boeing invested in buy backs instead of creating good products, and that has been its philosophy for a while.
"Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.”
"Everything seemed to be changing—the leadership, the culture, even the headquarters, with a move from Seattle to Chicago in 2001."
"Many employees struggled to adjust, or resented what they saw as a changing of the guard, where investors took priority over passengers."
Yes, I agree. But the whole business area has also changed and matured. B737 is 56 years old, but A320 is 38 years so not very new anymore. Certification takes very long nowadays, for any company. So the financialization might not have happened in a vacuum or because of some villain, but motivated by the situation that there was less money to be made with engineering anymore.
>>But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years.
Most of Boeing's Ls seem to have come from quality issues, and that seems to come downstream to cutting spending on engineering, testing and in general overall technical ecosystem.
There is no point in making 20 or even 200 new planes, if you don't make them well.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs
Ironic, given that Andy Grove's motto was "Only the paranoid survive".
There's a Chinese saying: "Wealth does not pass three generations". Three generations of Intel CEOs after Grove: Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini and Brian Krzanich (the progenitor of much of the mess that Intel is in today).
That's why I invested in Rapidus instead of Intel (nVidia has already peaked) it's making Japanese 1nm chips by end of decade, backed by Sony, Toyota, NEC and government. Unfortunately Intel is slow, and US government is unreliable now.
Vueling, the largest airline in Spain is actually shifting from the 320 to an all Boeing 737 MAX fleet in the coming years. I was really sad to hear that given it's size and presence in Europe.
This decision was actually made at IAG (International Airlines Group) which is the parent company of Vueling, British Airways, Iberia etc... not Vueling per se. The main motivation behind it is the price drop on the 737 MAX line. I'm surprised that switching to Boeing it's even worth it considering given these companies mostly fly Airbus planes so their pilots, supply chains for maintenance etc will need an overhaul
most low cost airlines are on 737 actually. I guess the strategy for Vuelling is definitely to go more after ryanair and other holiday carriers.
Some MBA types might also see the opportunity to lay off experienced expensive Airbus pilots and hire new cheaper Boeing pilots, classic strategic gambling, not sure those things ever pay off.
I think their fleet is largely fairly old; if they were to order a320s _now_ they could be waiting a decade (there's a horrendous backlog), so realistically they may not have much choice.
Eurowings (Lufthansa's low cost carrier) has also ordered 40 737 MAX (or rather has been "allocated" a probably pre-existing order): https://newscloud.eurowings.com/en/eurowings-sets-sights-on-... Notwithstanding the marketing BS, I wonder what the real reason behind this decision is - probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog, a "sweet" deal with Boeing, cozying up to Trump, and some other considerations that I can't think of right now?
EDIT: after researching a bit more, it looks like the initial order was from 2023 (https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-40-boeing-737-max-40-airb...), so "cozying up to Trump" was probably not a factor at the time. Also, I imagine that order being passed around like the proverbial hot potato between all the airlines in Lufthansa group, until it finally landed in Eurowings' lap: "Interested in some brand new state of the art 737 MAXes? No? Why? What do you mean, `You take them if you're so fond of them`? We would, gladly, but we have an all-A320 fleet and would like to keep it that way. Oh, you too, really?".
> probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog
It's likely this. Airbus has a backlog of ~7500 A32x orders right now, and produces about 75 a month, so if you order one today, you're looking at eight years.
Though also some budget airlines like the 737 because it's _short_; it's not as high off the ground as an A320, making access via airstairs more feasible.
I mean as budget airlines go, they're actually not at all bad. I recently went to Barcelona on Vueling and returned on Ryanair (due to flight timings), and I was easily twice as irritated by the flight back vs the flight out.
(They do, however, use Dublin airport's worst 'gate', 335, which is _actually_ a bus to a small fake terminal separate from any of the main ones.)
In my experience they're the worst. I have legs and 29" doesn't work for me. Twice they've had check-in so slow we all panicked thinking we would miss the flight. And they've been the worst I've ever experienced during IRROPS
It has been kind of shocking to see Boeing's decline in real time like this. My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority. Reading articles from current and former employees, it sounds like the decline actually began decades ago. It took this long to raid the coffers, so to speak, of talent, good will, and QA redundancy. It is suggested that they are too big to fail, but it will be expensive to re-pad all that redundancy, and I'm not sure subsequent leaders will be willing to lose the next decade of profit in pursuit of regaining their engineering credentials. I think the true cost of this has not yet been realised in their stock price.
> My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority.
I mean realistically in this particular category (narrow-bodies) they've essentially been playing catchup for the last _40 years_; ever since it was released they've really had trouble competing with the A320. Their inability to do basically anything right feels newer, but the 737 has long been a weak spot.
The main problem with the 737 is really just that it's old, and at every single turn Boeing has chosen to make incremental updates instead of redesigning it.
An issue like MCAS would be much less likely if the aircraft was designed to be fully fly-by-wire - but a fully fly-by-wire single-aisle would have to be recertified from scratch.
The problem with jetliner manufacturing is that you kind of have to bet the company on every single new model you release, just because the process of designing a new plane is so cumbersome and difficult that you can't really afford to be doing it very often.
It’s impressive that Airbus caught up with Boeing after a 20 year head start. It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid off but the article reads more like a PR piece than a case for why the A320 out competed the 737.
A320 and the 737 were designed in entirely different worlds.
The 737 was designed using light tables and slide rules, to use low-bypass turbofans and direct controls with avionics only on board to optionally aid the pilots.
The A320 was designed in CAD and using CFD, with full digital fly-by-wire, and designed from the start for high-bypass turbofans.
Both designs have been updated plenty since, but because the basic design is much more modern, the A320 is much more amenable to being updated. There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737.
The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.
> There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737.
Not only that, but Boeing is actually limited in how much they can "modernize" the 737, because doing too much might exceed the limits of the 737's type certificate. This is the reason behind the current engine inlet overheating worries, which has led to an airworthiness directive for the 737 MAX (https://aerospacenews.com/faa-airworthiness-directive_boeing...) and is also one of the reasons for the delay certifying the MAX 7 and MAX 10. This would be a complete non-issue for other planes, because all modern designs have a switch position that only turns on the engine anti-ice system when it's needed, but the 737 MAX can't have that because the 1967 737 didn't.
This sounds odd, they're able to certify the crazy MCAS but not a simple anti-ice switch?
I know that it's a complete nightmare to certify anything. However I apparently don't understand some underlying principle that allows to certify some things and not the others.
The constraint here (entirely self-imposed by Boeing's sales strategy) is that the newer models have to basically behave like the older models to avoid needing a new type certification. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_type_certificate) The aircraft behavior, and pilot procedures and training have to be substantially similar. That was the whole point of MCAS, to make the plane fly as-if it were an older model, despite the significantly different aerodynamics. Changing anti-icing procedures is apparently too big a difference to maintain the original type certification.
> That was the whole point of MCAS, to make the plane fly as-if it were an older model, despite the significantly different aerodynamics.
MCAS was implemented to make sure the control forces increase going into a stall, this is a requirement in the regulations. Without MCAS the control forces would drop on the way into a stall, which is an issue that would prevent certification of the aircraft.
From my understanding, mostly based on Kerbal Space Program, the aircraft isn’t well balanced when equiped with modern engines.
So you have to constantly apply some controls to fly, done by software.
I love stupid car comparisons so imagine a car with a new engine that is more economical to run, but very heavy on the left so the car constantly want to turn left. But if you apply force to the steering wheel manually or the car does it for you with software, all good. Still a shit car though.
The main issue arose because Boeing wanted to install larger, more fuel-efficient CFM LEAP-1B engines without changing the aircraft’s landing gear height too much (which would have required expensive redesigns of the fuselage and systems, triggering a new certification process). On earlier 737s, engines were already mounted quite far forward under the wing because of the aircraft’s low stance. The larger MAX engines could not fit in the same place without scraping the ground. Boeing moved the engines further forward and higher on the wing. This changed the center of thrust and lift characteristics. At high angles of attack (nose up), the repositioned engines created extra nose-up pitching moments, making the aircraft more prone to stall. To make the MAX “feel” like older 737s (so pilots wouldn’t require expensive retraining), Boeing added software — MCAS. MCAS automatically trims the horizontal stabilizer nose-down if it detects a high angle of attack, countering that engine-induced pitch-up. The tragedy was that MCAS initially relied on a single angle-of-attack sensor, so a faulty reading could (and did) trigger repeated nose-down inputs, leading to the two fatal crashes (Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian 302).
I think they added redundant sensors which should theoretically prevent this in future. IMHO, I think several issues compound here. They should have redesigned the fuselage. The engineering compromise is bad, but if handled with care, could have been done relatively safely. They opted for no additional pilot training re MCAS. This was a fatal mistake, compounded by them relying on a single sensor. Nothing in avionics relies on a single sensor for remaining in the air. That was insane. There MUST have been engineers screaming about safety who were ignored.
> MCAS automatically trims the horizontal stabilizer nose-down if it detects a high angle of attack
I remember when I first heard about the MCAS issue and thought "Why didn't the pilots just pull up?" and someone explained to me that MCAS worked by trimming, and it would trim nose-down so hard that even with full elevation to try to nose back up, it wasn't enough to overcome the extreme amount of nose-down from the trim.
And since pilots weren't trained on the new MCAS system, they weren't aware that the trim would have been automatically moved.
Boeing already had a angle of attack second sensor with the original design of the Max, but they ignored it and made decisions only using a single sensor.
How anyone thought making critical decisions on a single sensor reading made sense is beyond me.
Yeah, that was exactly my feeling too when I read that Airbus has "finally" caught up to Boeing. With that head start, catching up was not something that could have been expected (unless Boeing would have replaced the 737, which they arguably should have done years ago already, but that's a different story). Of course, if you look into the details, things get more complicated, since the 737 had an in-house narrowbody competitor with the 757 for some time - but Airbus now has the same, with the A220 competing with the smaller A320 family models (A318 and A319).
Was the 757 _really_ meaningfully a 737 competitor? I've only ever seen them used for fairly long-haul flights; didn't think there was much role crossover.
Boeing had a 20 year head start, but in a rapidly growing market that doesn’t count as much as in a stable one. FTA:
“By 1988, when Airbus launched its new A320 narrowbody jet, Boeing had already established a strong lead, having delivered around 1,500 of its popular jets”
So, Boeing sold about 1,500 767s in the first 20 years and over 10,500 in the < 40 years since. Airbus sold about 12,000 in the < 40 years since.
So, to catch up, Airbus produced about 15% more than Boeing did.
Only if a company is completely blind to buy Boeing planes in 2025!
It does not matter if the places are millions of dollars cheaper, all the money spent with lawsuits and lawyers when things go sideways, plus the airline name dragged to shit, I don't think it is worth.
I fly on 737 MAXes pretty often. They're still modern aircraft, and they still have a good safety record overall (consider that almost 2000 have been produced, and there have only been two crashes). Boeing will keep pumping them out and they will go on to be just as reliable as any other modern jetliner.
The flying public generally does not know or care what the model of plane they're on is. I almost never see anyone actually pull out the safety card from the seatback pocket to check. I'm not sure if it can be a reputational risk.
The airline with the best safety record in the world, Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet (with the exception of the Lauda Airbus A320-200s) that has never had a fatal accident, despite over a 120 Boeing 737 MAX-8s currently operating.
It’s probably easy to find a subset of airlines that would work for either airline.
But that RyanAir didn’t happen to have a version of the design that was extremely unsafe doesn’t mean that the family of planes is safer than the competition. It just means that it got lucky that it didn’t have the flawed planes.
it's by design, Ryanair never buys from the factory AFAIK. They buy secondhand, they are basically scalpers of the second hand market, always on the lookout for a good deal.
That mitigates the risk of buying untested tech with first-iteration demons
That's the complete opposite of reality. Ryanair only buy new from Boeing (often being the largest customer - the MAX 8 200 being designed specifically for their needs) and have the youngest fleet of any major.
Even that's not true. Following a meeting with Herb Kelleher, when then-CFO O'Leary became CEO in January 1994, the airline ordered its first Boeing 737s direct from Boeing and has never flown a second-hand aircraft since (unless you include the Airbus A320s from the Lauda acquisition).
Indeed, but the practical result in this case is that the A320 is _much_ more expensive, because demand is far higher. Ryanair's big purchase of 737 MAX-10s a while back was at, at most, 50% of list price; that degree of discount isn't really happening for the A32x at the moment, I don't think.
Good, Airbus deserves it. Boeing management prioritised stock price by aggressively cutting costs, outsourcing critical work, and pressuring engineers into a compromising safety culture, and quality control. Dennis Muilenburg is mostly to blame them gave himself over $90 million in compensation and severance. I assume Airbus knows this behaviour is bad?
Not surprising, no? Boeing has killed so many people, and had so many near-misses recently that there is no way I'm flying in a Boeing plane these days.
The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start.
When you're not totally absorbed by the share price, and instead you're trying to build a sustainable long-term business that can pay off decades (or generations), later, you get to make decisions that lead to a more sustainable and trusted business.
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