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?
Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.
>Monopolies will kill you. So when is it gonna kill Google?
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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#44Complacency - 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…
> 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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Monopolies will kill you. So when is it gonna kill Google?
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 Wind…
>Not an OP, but I think the [...] monopoly is likely to end within the next 10 years.
People have been saying the same about Microsoft for 20+ years. Now it's again, the most valuable company in the world.
At what point do people admit they're just bad at predicting the future?
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#47Poised?? 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.
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.
> Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet
That's probably the biggest reason for their safety record: the same plane means common maintenance, training and operations, giving much less risk.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.
>Monopolies will kill you. So when is it gonna kill Google?
Google has a monopoly in search. But it expanded to many other markets with plenty of competition. It will continue to thrive in those markets
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#49Vueling, 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.
Re: Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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