The 787 development was so poorly planned and executed that it cost Boeing $28 billion in additional unplanned expenditure. And they've kicked that can down the road by booking that as 'deferred costs', an accounting sleight of hand that lets them pretend they haven't spent each dollar until they have earned it on a sale.

Neither company of the duopoly came out of that rivalry looking good.

But at least Airbus has accounted for all the A380 dev costs, no-one has to face that 10 years hence.

Airbus had it's own fair share of development troubles with the A380 though, including the infamous cabling issue due to different software versions between France and Germany, and accompanying years of delays.

I also highly doubt that the A380 has broken even.

Building these beasts that are modern airplanes is just tough. I am fascinated with the whole supply chain topic though.

Maybe John Hart-Smith of Douglas...

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=200...

it's a good read on outsourcing, profits and management.

> I also highly doubt that the A380 has broken even.

That's not what it's saying, but that A380 dev is written off, while Boeing still has it on the books somewhere to make an appearance in the future.

The crazy thing is that this has been the primary business model in the automotive industry for decades at this point and it (generally) works exactly as advertised. If I had to posit why the benefits failed to materialize fot Boeing, it's that the Aerospace industry's approach to and competence with supplier development and quality control is sorely lacking in comparison to that of the automotive sector.

It took decades for the major OEMs to get a handle on the mechanations of the tiered supplier system and they were also operating in a sector where production volumes are measured in the hundreds of thousands. It's far easier to absorb the cost of a "learning moment" when you can spread the cost of a new iniection mold made to the right spec over 100,000+ units. There are also far more opportunities for "learning moments" to appear when you're making hundreds of parts a day versus one a month. Not only can you play catch up without incurring too much of a cost penalty if a whole days production is scrapped, you can gather far more data to help you refine your process (statistical process control).

If you want a good reason military aerospace is a mess and NaSA couldn't build a replacement for the space shuttle, that's a big big reason.

see: https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/airbus-confirms-a...

I don't think so. The article you linked says only that they need to be in compliance with WTO rules. There is nothing about no government support at all.

According to recent media reports in Germany Airbus and its subcontractors got a 1 billion loan for developing the plane. Paying back them is coupled to the commercial success of the product. Because of the premature end of the product the companies will probably never have to pay the loans completely. Exact figures are not public yet.

https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/super-loss-make...

And that bet made a lot of sense before 2008. The number of slots mostly wasn't growing, but number of passengers on airports was going really fast, with no serious economist predicting it would stop soon.

What Airbus didn't explain was how the airports wouldn't invest in more slots, but would invest in the huge runway clearances required by their plane.

Not to mention increased terminal capacity for the sheer number of passengers disembarking all at once.

A layover in the US almost always translates to me missing my connecting flight when I go in or out of this country. No matter what airport I go through.

Anywhere else on the planet you would pass through a metal detector to get upstairs to the departure lounge and get on your plane.

This is why if you are travelling to Europe from NZ (as I will be on Monday) Singapore/Hong Kong/Shanghai/Tokyo are better candidates for transfers than LAX/SFO

In Fiji they have a band that plays songs for you as you stand in the customs line, can you imagine that in Seattle?

We flew from Toronto to SF, had a 7 hour layover. It was grand. We even went downtown and back with plenty of time. Her one sister flew in from Vancouver—also no problems.

Her other relatives flew in from Victoria, and got stuck in customs at SFO for over 3 hours when their layover was scheduled to be just over an hour. They had to rely on the graciousness of the airline to get them on another flight. They had to take a 4 am flight to Honolulu which had a 4-5 hour layover then connect to Kona. The Iron Man race was the next day that we went to see. They didn't get to sleep for 30+ hours. I mean, there are worse cases where you'll have to endure that kind of stuff. Calfornia->Hawaii is a pretty good place for it to happen. But still.

We were through US customs at YYZ in about 20 minutes.

On another hand we took the Victoria -> Seattle Clipper ferry and US Customs in the Seattle port just sort of hand-waved us through.

Less than two hours for an international-domestic transfer is crazy at ANY airport, USian or otherwise.

If only they knew when those flights were arriving so they could schedule customs and immigration staff to handle the traffic /s

Both of these flights were originally scheduled to land around 8am. They landed around 5am so they had 2 CBP officers on shift to handle a 767 and a 777's worth of people. That mess ate up the entire gain of arriving early.

They would have known about the early arrival not too much earlier than the departure time (order of hours, not days), which isn't really enough time to shift people's work schedules.

Took me a few seconds to get this...:)

But the in-airport issues we used to experiment are mostly gone after the airports are privatized. It's amazing how the airlines are able to do people's checkin faster after some structural problems on the airport management are solved.

Plus besides the exterior space needed for the gate the interior space for handling so many people loading and offloading is the equivalent to two or more planes.

Even Boeing recently went to folding wing tips to fit their newest super efficient designs into existing gate setups.

I am not sure if Boeing had it developed and never used it, or no one ordered it so they never developed it.

Theyre in the middle of building what I think was the first 777x. We saw it in the Everett factory last Friday.

Delta/AA/B6/UA fly virtually hourly shuttle flights from NYC to BOS, DC, ORD, LAX because business travellers want choice of departure and arrival - not because they don't have bigger planes.

Taking 10 daily flights and turning it into 5 isn't optimal from a passenger perspective on business routes where it means I have 2 hours to kill because my meeting is timed wrong.

It also means if my meeting ends early, I have a chance on hopping on an earlier flight.

A high frequency mainline flight + a low frequency regional leg = You can get a short/optimal connection time with at least one of those mainline flight choices.

But if both flights are low frequency, you wind up with a lot of connections hitting unappealing layover times that drive business to the competitor with a shorter layover.

[1] Hopefully in 2050 we'll have rediscovered how to build railways in the USA and actually have HSR from NYC to BOS making this example a bad one.

It's disheartening both that Gov Newsom wants to kill it and how ecstatic people are about that. The 'can't do' culture is very strong in the US.

Operating planes designed for spanning the globe (777, 787, 350, etc) over shorter distances (<4,000 miles) just to get the extra seats becomes much less economical due to the weight of those planes and the wasted space on cargo capacity that can't be filled on the shorter routes.

Even Heathrow and Frankfurt, with famously strong opposition against new runways, have managed to get new runways approved but not to extend hours into the night.

Surely it's not the people that live there but the wealth and political clout of said people.

Personally I don't mind the sound of aircraft or trains.

SFO has given up on building another runway, which means the only way to grow is with larger airplanes. Some other large US airports are also likely to reach maximum movements in the next decade, and I imagine the same is true globally.

And then on top of that California appears to be backing away from HSR. The biggest cost (legally, politically, financially) for HSR was land acquisition, the same reason SFO canned plans for an additional runway, and the same reason it's not feasible to expand metropolitan highways. Because traffic will only get worse, making OAK and SJC increasingly less attractive to those living on the peninsula, I'm guessing that SFO will see more A380 service than less.

Not that it would make any difference for A380 viability, but it's understandable why Airbus, Emirates, and some others held fast to the promise of the A380 for so long.

A week ago HN user Xixi linked to an article, https://leehamnews.com/2015/12/11/bjorns-corner-twins-or-qua..., arguing that the 4-engined A380 is actually more fuel efficient and less costly to maintain than comparable 2-engined aircraft like the 777 because 2-engined aircraft need overpowered engines. According to this argument what really killed the A380 was exactly what Emirates was upset about: no manufacturer was willing to sell an engine upgrade, so the A380 would be stuck with older generation engines while both contemporary and new model aircraft benefit from newer engines. I guess the engine manufacturers' calculus is largely concerned with volume, but it's also a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

After reading that article I wasn't surprised when, perusing the Wikipedia pages for the new A220 (Bombardier CS300), Embraer E-Jet E2, Russian Irku MC-21, and Mitsubishi Regional Jet, I discovered that all the new planes at the small end of the market--a market that both Boeing and Airbus turned away from just a few years ago--are sporting a variant of Pratt & Whitney's new geared turbofan. It seems like in today's environment it's the engine that makes or breaks the plane.