Even that's predictably shifted in the last few years. HN is perpetually turning into Reddit in the sense of being on a level with where Reddit was 3-5 years ago.
I believe that was the point. Aircraft economics barely sustains two airframers per market segment, and uncompetitive offerings aren't going to raise safety/QC bars in a regulated industry
(and whilst you've got the scope to leave the airframe design/sales op alone and [further] vertically disintegrate the supply chain instead, that might actually make it worse, with the Spirit/Boeing relationship plausibly having a causal relationship with this incident)
Is the argument here that it's more economically viable to run a plane building company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky? Naively, it would seem to me to be a bad business decision to design aero planes that can't fly, but what do I know.
> it's more economically viable to run a plane building company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky?
Business school may say if your product never fails perhaps you are overspending on it and some known small failure rate is acceptable to control costs to have better profits. Boeing leadership may have took that logic and applied it to airplanes.
Is that argument wrong? If it isn't, then you've successfully identified capitalism as the problem. I'm all for anti-capitalism, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to start with Boeing.
This is not a problem of "pointy haired MBA's", we can either fix this within the current regime by imposing heavy fines on this sort of reckless behavior, or we can tear down the current regime and replace it with communism/fascism/monarchy/whatever. In the system we are currently in, what happened at Boeing looks to be "correct", in the sense that it's what the system incentivizes.
It's a sticky product. There isn't an alternative from Boeing in this market segment that's viable in a modern fleet from what I understand, and airlines tend to be either Boeing or Airbus, so it would take a huge push to get an airline to migrate from one to the other – possibly multiple failed models and significant compensation to fund building up the maintenance infrastructure for the other manufacturer and pilot retraining.
which will never happen.
Airbus is a pan european political project asmuch as a competitor to boeing. (also, one which is hugely important for independence of european airtransport).
It's functionally impossible for Airbus to take over all of Boeing's contracts. Airbus itself has an order backlog in the thousands.
They're not REALLY competing with Boeing.
The consolidation in aerospace and defense was a much longer process than that. All of the companies with names like “McDonnell Douglas”, “Lockheed Martin”, or “Northrop Grumman” were formed by mergers. If you actually break apart Boeing’s merger history there were at least a half dozen WWII-era companies that slowly consolidated over half a century.
Part of this was because WWII subsidized an unsustainable and frankly absurd level of demand. For instance, Grumman almost exclusively built carrier-based fighters, and by the end of WWII they were producing planes so quickly that the Navy stopped doing periodic heavy maintenance of their aircraft in lieu of dumping them into the sea and replacing them with brand new planes. Obviously business for Grumman would never be quite that good ever again.
