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The Coming Boeing Bailout?

mattstoller.substack.com

51–60 of 189 posts

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#51

Not a viewpoint I agree with. Boeing has plenty of business. 737 MAX sales may suffer, but that will not kill the Boeing Company. Aviation is a deadly serious business. Design is done by people, which are highly flawed cogs in the system. The system was broken. (meaning design, verification, and certification process). The system can be fixed. Incompetence at some levels; perhaps. Not murder and not criminal behavior…

> Given a crew that has experienced an AOA sensor failure during MCAS operation in the simulator, I would fly on a 737 MAX as it was delivered. Without concern.

How about if the crew failed to recover in the simulator?

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#52
The problem is that corruption has already reached the core.

The military-industry complex, the revolving door scheme, pretty much everything. I mean the system still works because the United States, so far, is still the most powerful country.

But for how long?

The elites are not doing their job, so the people should pick up from here. But the thing is, the people are not able to do this either.

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#53
post #39
post #16

Governments should have predatory practice towards shareholders in these cases. If company can't be allowed to fail (strategically important or government regulated sector like banking) there should be 'fluid bankruptcy' option. When they default or fail their obligations, the next day the government owns them without operations being disrupted. Shareholders lose everything overnight and any private debt would have s…

Isn't that pretty much what happened with GM? The stocks and bonds were all wiped out. And then the new GM was owned by the government / union until they did an IPO a few years later?

the same basically happened with the ABN AMRO bank in the Netherlands.

Goverment did a bailout and turned the bank into a state owned enterprise until recently.

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#54
post #22

While Boeing clearly participates in a duopoly... cash flow may necessitate a bailout. Cash on hand is going to get hammered by penalties for out of service planes and lost revenues due to the inability to deliver new planes. Outside of that, it will be interesting to see how endemic the issues were. Here is hoping that this was an isolated incident. The nightmare scenario would be multiple models suffering from a wi…

This is part of the reason critical markets shouldn't be allowed to get pinned down so far by one or two big players gobbling up competitors through mergers and buyouts--even 4 gets risky. If there was truly healthy competition in the sector (a requirement for capitalism to work effectively) then Boeing going down wouldn't have nearly as much of a significant impact on society--it should be welcomed. Other competitor…

the current system results in the worst of both worlds. The company gets it's enormous profits in private, but when it makes a massive mistake which could be avoided, the rest of society is somehow on the hook to bail them out.

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#55
post #51

Not a viewpoint I agree with. Boeing has plenty of business. 737 MAX sales may suffer, but that will not kill the Boeing Company. Aviation is a deadly serious business. Design is done by people, which are highly flawed cogs in the system. The system was broken. (meaning design, verification, and certification process). The system can be fixed. Incompetence at some levels; perhaps. Not murder and not criminal behavior…

> Given a crew that has experienced an AOA sensor failure during MCAS operation in the simulator, I would fly on a 737 MAX as it was delivered. Without concern. How about if the crew failed to recover in the simulator?

If they fail to recover the first time, that would be excellent. (the pilot thinks "wow, this is hard and I need to learn..")

Pilots do not like to die. If the first attempt was incorrect, they will do it again. and again. and again.

A crew that was unsuccessful would not leave the training device until they had mastery of the situation. (and, the airline would not let them fly)

For a single crew, the simulator time is very cheap. very cheap * 10,000 crew members shows up on a spreadsheet; thus the avoidance of simulator training by management.

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#56
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Boeing and Airbus have (somewhat credibly) argued the other is getting subsidies already. Would that really change anything? Bombardier draw the short straw as it was smaller and wasn't able to combat the duopoly of Boeing/Airbus. (Embraer, Sukhoi and Irkut are also in the game but more in niche market shares).

> Bombardier draw the short straw as it was smaller and wasn't able to combat the duopoly of Boeing/Airbus. It was able to compete though on the merit of its products before the duties came into play. The duties were designed to kill its momentum and it did -- look at the loss of orders in 2017 compared to 2016. But once the issue is resolved, the orders in 2018 are huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_…

[deleted]

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#58
post #10

How did Boeing make miracles in civilian aircraft? In short, the the civilian engineers were in charge. And it fell apart because the company, due to a merger, killed its engineering-first culture Uhm, this makes me think about the engineering-first of Google. I wonder if Google will end in the same path...

Haven't they already taken some big strides down that direction?

Google Maps doesn't work fluidly on an upper medium tier smartphone. Google search often doesn't find very obvious results which it used to find better in my experience. I feel like Google is already slowly degrading and resting on their old laurels.

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#59
post #17

or let the free market and invisible hand take swift care of it

Free market and Invisible Hand bot fails when there's a monopoly/duopoly, especially when the players are deeply embedded in government structures, like Boing is, thanks to their status as the largest defense contractor for the US military.

Re: The Coming Boeing Bailout?

#60
post #9

Boeing and the US government recently killed the Canadian aviation industry by putting on 300% duties on our main manufacturer because of a government bailout it received. See: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/us-issues... As a result Bombardier, Canadian's only large aviation manufacturer, was sold to AirBus: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bombardie... The cause was a Canadian p…

The duties were also overturned in the end, but not before Bombardier gifted 50.01% of the C-Series program to Airbus so it had a chance of survival. The net result was Airbus rebranded the program the A220, committed to building US-destination A220 jets within the US to avoid tariffs anyways and while they significantly weakened one [small] competitor (Bombardier and by extension Investissement Québec) they massivel…

Both the 2nd generation E-Jets and the A220 beat the pants of the 737 with the caveat that they are smaller planes that carry fewer passengers.

They also are smaller planes that have better comfort than the 737 in most respects; it is like the Japanese cars of the 1970s which were big on the inside and small on the outside compared to American cars of the time. You have to fly it to believe it.

I could see these eating into the 737/A320 market from the small side the same way that the 777/787 classes ate into the 747 market. The A220/E2 Jets would have been even more appealing had the airliners known that 737 MAX pilots will require simulator training. (And they will... Boeing will probably delay the 737 MAX return to service by trying to insist that they won't, but the FAA has one way to get credibility back, and that is requiring simulator training of an MCAS failure, just as A320 pilots need training on what to do if the fly-by-wire system gets in a degraded state)

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