411–420 of 494 posts
Well since the 787 program will very likely never break even, let alone turn in profit, for Boeing, the 737's replacement will be a do or die project for Boeing. They cannot afford another money-losing product.
boeing will never die as long as the government wants to have a domestic passenger airline manufacturer. and they pretty clearly do want that. it'll take more than financial losses to kill boeing.
Well since the 787 program will very likely never break even, let alone turn in profit, for Boeing, the 737's replacement will be a do or die project for Boeing. They cannot afford another money-losing product.
boeing will never die as long as the government wants to have a domestic passenger airline manufacturer. and they pretty clearly do want that. it'll take more than financial losses to kill boeing.
Now.
Opportunistic politics mixed with the religion of infinite profit maximization produces a turbulent swampt to build the future of anything on top of.
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A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
> A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer. Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession. I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors? It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-d…
Is this the New Midsize Airplane, the "797", again? [1] That's been on and off for over a decade. Should have been shipping by now. The COMAC C919 is finally shipping, although it's not a great aircraft and China still imports the engines. COMAC will probably do better in the next round. Will Embraeier build something in that size range? They could. They already build small midsize aircraft.[3] This looks like Boeing…
i assume there is a limited talent pool of the required people
This will be Boeings answer to the Bombardier C Series, aka the Airbus A220 series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220 , which is one of the nicest planes for short haul in service at the moment. Edit: indeed, not the 'Neo', I got the name wrong but the link right.
The A220 is an absolute treat. Can't put exactly my finger on why, but it just feels right in size, noise, the little screens at the top. Flown it once or twice with AirBaltic, and would love to take it again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmaintenance/comments/1colti...
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It won't be. Even an extinction level asteroid or comet impact will be easier to handle on a planet with breathable atmosphere, water, and other resources. Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that. Still, Mars would require much more self-sufficiency than we've ever attempted. It's worth the effort to expand human exploration.
> Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that I hear this somewhat often, and I find it a bit disingenuous since it's not like we're trying that hard to colonize Antarctica, we're mostly preserving it as well as we can, no? And the existing Antarctic bases aren't total hellholes or anything, AFAIK the larger ones are relatively normal spaces with power and…
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To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
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True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.
Symbian did have some touch models in the end but they were very poor because they still used resistive touch and the UI was not well laid out for it.
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One of the most exceptional CEOs I've worked with was a lawyer. I still think the proverb is largely correct, along with the other proverb about the exception proving the rule.
That's not what "the exception proves the rule" means. It means, when you see a sign that says an exception, "no parking Wednesdays between 8 and 12", it proves the rule that parking is allowed otherwise.
It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s. There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybod…
But is there room for innovation in the airliner industry anymore? Let's have a thought experiment If you use the same engines from the same vendors, same aluminum, same carbon fiber, same landing gear. Almost everything just like the others, can you really differentiate anymore? Or if you are a component vendor, can you really innovate that much anymore? Ie maybe it can be argued it is the correct move, from the boa…
There's still not a lot of ceramic fiber in use in the engines. That's a pure weight reduction and fuel efficiency increase, up to the point that NOx emissions can't be controlled.
Given the rapidly advancing VTOL autonomous drone tech, harbor tug concepts may yet make an appearance. The funding for this could be driven from rescue aircraft, short range powerful VTOLs optimized to go pluck a struggling aircraft out of the sky and put it on the ground. The obvious evolution of that is ditching a lot of the landing weight. Reinforced undercarriage, landing gears, high-lift devices almost all exist to be used in a very short segment of the flight. Unlike roads, automation in the air has quite a bit less variability to deal with. Would you rather pilots try to put a plane with a mechanical issue on the ground by skillfully manipulating throttles or let an overgrown DJI take a swing?