Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
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Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#2Complacency - 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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#3It’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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#4Complacency - 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…
Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#5Makes it even more impressive considering that the A320 is slightly more expensive.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#6It’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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#7Complacency - 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…
Another recent example is Intel.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#8It’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.
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).
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#9It’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…
> The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.
What’s wrong with the 737 design that it wouldn’t pass today as a new aircraft? (Ignoring the disaster that was the MAX.)
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#10In my country we have a saying - "Every dog has its day".