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Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

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Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#171

Post by inferiorhuman »

tomoyoirl wrote: post #96
breadwinner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really that cheap? 737 MAX uses 20% less fuel. 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 acce…

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.

The 20% savings is compared to a 737 NG. On longer flights it still uses more fuel than an A320 NEO. Scroll down to page 23.

https://www.aircraft-commerce.com/wp-content/uploads/aircraf...

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#172

Post by rjbwork »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #100
atleastoptimal wrote: post #75

I feel like this pattern occurs in too many companies across all sectors: 1. Company is product-quality focused 2. Beats competition and creates mini-monopoly 3. Sales becomes somewhat inelastic to changes in quality 4. This leads "cost-cutting" and marketing focused execs/decision making to beat out product quality execs/decision making 5. Company's product quality takes predictable linear path to the bottom

Enshittification?

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.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#173

Post by KennyBlanken »

stg22 wrote: post #140

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…

What's wild is that all this happened even with the NSA conducting industrial espionage on Airbus on behalf of Boeing and M-D.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#174

Post by inferiorhuman »

jltsiren wrote: post #37
mcv wrote: post #34

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…

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 als…

  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).

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#175

Post by scythe »

jltsiren wrote: post #47
stcredzero wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. And here.

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 f…

>Their latest model is the Irkut MC-21, which has a few hundred orders. Again, effectively all of the orders are Russian.

It doesn't exactly help that nobody wants to work with Russia for reasons.

>They [Embraer, Brazil] have been decades in the business, but they have not made any attempt to build a competitor for the A320 and B737.

They are actively attempting precisely this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family

To contextualize, both Irkut, now called Yakovlev, and Embraer received massive support from their respective governments to get started.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#176

Post by AniseAbyss »

Animats wrote: post #85
jltsiren wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Airbus was a political project. It took them over 20 years before they produced anything good. But then they got it right.

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.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#177

Post by klausa »

scythe wrote: post #175
jltsiren wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

>Their latest model is the Irkut MC-21, which has a few hundred orders. Again, effectively all of the orders are Russian. It doesn't exactly help that nobody wants to work with Russia for reasons. >They [Embraer, Brazil] have been decades in the business, but they have not made any attempt to build a competitor for the A320 and B737. They are actively attempting precisely this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E…

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.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#178

Post by slama »

GeekyBear wrote: post #141
atleastoptimal wrote: post #75

I feel like this pattern occurs in too many companies across all sectors: 1. Company is product-quality focused 2. Beats competition and creates mini-monopoly 3. Sales becomes somewhat inelastic to changes in quality 4. This leads "cost-cutting" and marketing focused execs/decision making to beat out product quality execs/decision making 5. Company's product quality takes predictable linear path to the bottom

> “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 B…

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."

https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-capitalists-dilemma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#179

Post by pfannkuchen »

Beldin wrote: post #87
throwup238 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of orders and deliveries is public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_... 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. Basically: Switching cost are stratospheric.

Why can’t airbus ramp up production and soak up Boeing’s customers? Too regulated?

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#180

Post by danpalmer »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #160
danpalmer wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 availab…

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?

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