I'm absolutely certain that if Boeing was making a 757NG like aircraft, United would have bought those. When it comes down to it, Boeing has no direct replacement for the 757. Airbus does, so United bought airbus.
They tried with the 787-3 and that simply didn't sell.
Look at the sales figured for the 757 - sales were either flat or very slow from 2001 onward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_757#Orders_and_deliveri...
Boeing stopped making the plane because the situations that led to its existence evaporated, and it looked as if there would never be more demand again, and the world seemed to be trending to 737 size aircraft in ever increasing numbers.
The EUs move for greater local safety review, ironically, might make Airbus less safe, since they might be able to capture the EU regulators.
[edit] to emphasize: it's not market competition or the EU being better than the USA that's different. It's just the quasi-monopoly the FAA has on global aviation safety checks and the effect it has on foreign versus local companies.
In fairness, if there were multiple US aircraft manufacturers, they might battle each other for FAA regulatory capture and prevent either of them from achieving it.
[double edit] For the reverse of this see Dieselgate: discovered by some random American(named of all things John German) and pushed into the limelight by the EPA or whatever. It's not a perfect metaphor since he worked for an NGO, but arguably even civil society faces a sort of funder capture. Would German environmental NGOs have blown the whistle on something like this? Maybe?
I think yes, it's just that they expected the regulatory system to work. Companies intentionally defeating emissions tests, unthinkable! ... just as unthinkable as the FAA rubberstamping whatever Boeing puts in front of them :(
I'm not sure this is true in a practical sense. For example, Airbus does the same unbelievable things with AoA sensors that Boeing did with MCAS: even if they have two or three of them on an aircraft, they don't compare them before allowing one sensor to drive automatic functions, so a single failed sensor can cause the airplane to do unexpected and dangerous things (for example, multiple uncommanded pitch down events on Quantas Flight 72). A true adversarial regulator would never have allowed such design flaws.
[1] "The exact nature of the corruption was that the ADIRU CPU erroneously re-labelled the altitude data word so that the binary data that represented 37,012 (the altitude at the time of the incident) would represent an angle of attack of 50.625 degrees." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Potential_tri...
So the EU's "vaunted" adversarial regulator actually was doing a much worse job than the FAA.
Of course they can still influence politicians by talking about all the jobs they will provide etc. Also power in Europe is not centralized the same way as it is in the US. In the US you can lobby Washington DC.
American lobbyist companies started swarming Brüssels as soon as the EU started gaining more power over national legislation.
So there is potential for the EU to head in the US direction, but it isn't quite there yet.
Also far more complex - the political groupings in europe (EPP, ALDE, etc) are far looser organizations than the US parties, and power is spread in lots of different levels. Most Euro countries are coalitions of smaller parties too, defence in depth.
The US and UK suffer from having just two parties that from time to time get all the power. Infiltrate one party and your time will come. Infiltrate both and you're safe.
Please stop that. Brussels is the English name for the city and clearly that letter does not exist in English. Alternatives are "Brussel" (Dutch) and "Bruxelles" (French). The closest to what you wrote is the German "Brüssel" (no S).
Corruption in Europe is different, and often more subtle, than in the US (have lived and worked in both) but I do feel that over the 30 years the US has really gotten a lot worse compared to the EU countries.
It's not that European companies get the kid glove treatment if they violate the law.
Also, note, how during Trump presidency EU is so much more cautious with that. Cynic in me says that's the proof that it is and has always been political. US can go after VW, MB, BMW, Porsche, Siemens, etc. There is no way that no federal laws are violated with the scale od operations these companies have in the US. All it takes is skilled and ambitious US Attorney General on Trump orders. Look at Lufthansa. All they need to do, and there were gossips about it being implemented already, is to ban electronics on flights to the US due to "battery self-ignition risk". But exempt US based carriers. Remember customer is always right. And Germany's BEST customer (who also happens to provide military security) is the US. Some people in EU seem not to grasp this simple truth
This is HN not the Daily Mail comments section, let's keep this space free of baseless europhobic disinformation.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/suspicions-of-...
Boeing can't even keep its newest plane in the skies, and may have killed off the 737 line for good. Think another revision after the MAX is ever going to be approved?
Their product and their brand are worse than bad, but they make a lot of money.
Yes, I agree the 50 year old design seems to have reached its end of life.
The KC46 is being fielded by the US and a few nations that the US traditionally use the same arms.
The A330 is fielded by the UK, a couple commonwealth nations and KSA
Total number built is in the 30s for both.
* https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29933/air-force-says-i...
* https://www.aerotime.aero/clement.charpentreau/24184-no-fix-...
Everything would have been fine except there was so much pressure to make every change as modest as possible that it didn't quite all work. They needed to either make significant changes to the landing gear or significant changes to the flight control computer and they chose neither.
The 787 is the newest airframe and it's fine. The 737 is the Windows XP of the sky and there's only so much you can fix with service packs.
How about the KC-46 and 777X?
- The Ducommon airframes in 2013, problem is FAA delegated certification to Boeing,
- The batteries, albeit smaller,
- The MAX, 2 crashes due to oversight and to the FAA delegating certification to Boeing.
Boeing’s problem didn’t come in a day, but in 20 years since the merge with MD, who had the same lose and fast culture. Airbus is safe for the time being, even if risks always exist, political instability for example. Not the case for the moment.
... though from the same era, there is this for Boeing which seems much worse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
Or this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
This is the same basic design flaw that Boeing's MCAS has (allowing a single AoA sensor failure to cause the airplane to do unexpected and dangerous things), but unlike MCAS, it wasn't an ad hoc addition to deal with an issue in a redesign of an old airplane, it was designed into all Airbus fly-by-wire aircraft from the start.
The issue was caused by one of the ADIRU CPUs corrupting valid sensor data to produce a series of very specific spikes, hitting a specific edge case in the AoA cross-check logic that made the flight computer behave as if the erroneous data it was seeing was valid.
It's undoubtedly a serious design flaw, but it's not even remotely in the same ballpark as the Max's flagrant disregard for all process and well known design standards.
What the article you linked to describes doesn't look quite like that to me. It looks like a design that does not use the "median of three values" method that the article says is used for "most" sensors (but not AoA). I agree, however, with your correction that it was not a direct AoA sensor failure such as occurred in the 737 Max incidents.
> It's undoubtedly a serious design flaw, but it's not even remotely in the same ballpark as the Max's flagrant disregard for all process and well known design standards.
It's not the same as MCAS in the sense that it's not an ad hoc addition to deal with an issue that arose in a redesign of an old airplane, true.
However, it is a case of (a) a flaw in an automated system causing the plane to automatically take an action that is unexpected and dangerous, instead of the automated system detecting the error; and (b) an automated system overriding the input of the human pilot in a case where the human pilot can plainly see that the automated system is doing something wrong.
Also, it illustrates a more general design philosophy with Airbus that has led to other incidents, which is to hide important information about what the automated system is doing from the pilots and limit their ability to interfere with its operation. The pilots have no direct readout of the AoA sensor values that the automated system is using, or indeed of most of its other inputs. It was also not clear to the pilots exactly what mode the automated system was in (they thought it was in Direct Law when it wasn't), and there was not a simple "stop the automation" button they could press to put the plane into a known manual mode with known behavior.
While I would agree that this is not the same specific failure mode as MCAS was with Boeing, I'm not sure it's not "remotely in the same ballpark" as far as long term implications are concerned.
While there might be a economic benefit to not having to go the extra mile to get a regulators aproval, this can bite you really badly if you cannot uphold quality yourself any longer. And the interviews I heard wirh Boeing personel is nothing I ever heard even in personal exchanges with Airbus people. They surely also have their issues, bur to me it feels like a few magnitudes difference in severity.
So in short: underfunding the FAA isn’t doing you airplane manufacturers a favour in the long term. I know in the US people are usually anxious to give any job to the state, but regulating is actually one of the things they should do, and should do well
Why would you say that?
> profit (cutting corners)
Is profit the same as cutting corners?
I think what is being missed here is nuance - I don't think air-travel with 0 risk is possible - most things come with risk and if we are not willing to consider anything else nothing will ever get done.
The nature of their products and customers, and the scale needed, may not lend itself to having a lot of smaller competitors. Where are the economies of scale (or other efficiencies) going to come from? This may already be reasonably optimal for large aircraft.
This is true, but the counterpoint is: America isn't going to pay very much for accidentally killing its last airliner manufacturer.
Airliners are a very mature market, with little incentive to innovate and minimal gains when you do. It's literally cheaper to operate 20 year old vehicles than replace them with the best available new ones! In how many other industries is that true?
And airliners are small: Airbus revenue is like $60B, Boeing (which also sees a lot of defense spending to pad the number) is $100B. No one else is even on the map. This is a tiny market, in a global sense. We're just stuck on the idea of it being important because of history: Airliners "feel like" a high tech growth industry of the future. They aren't. They're trains, basically.
The core devil's advocate position here is: so what? Boeing failed. Let them die (or rather, shrivel into the defense-only core of the company). Let the rest of the world fight over this tiny market with its shrinking margins. Nations that truly want to invent new things and grow in new ways[1] have better things to do and more important problems to worry about.
[1] Whether the USA still qualifies is sort of an open question, but for a different thread.
Except for bart, basically. And I certainly treat bart and MUNI as competitive products for commuting to work, although it doesn’t feel like MUNI does...
BART's service is long-train (up to 10 cars) through service on fully dedicated trackways following a single through route within San Francisco. If you happen to be transiting any points between Colma and Embarcadero strickly along that route, BART is your best bet.
MUNI Metro serves multiple endpoints throughout San Francisco, several lines of which transit the upper level of the Market Street subway. Outside that route, the metro shares rights of way with street traffic, resulting in drastically less predictable schedules. The requirement to manage tight-radius curves and street traffic also limits the length of metro trainsets to a maximum of two coupled trolleys.
The results aren't pretty, for MUNI. But that's all but a given under the environment they're operating in.
Not necessarily. They could exclusively run fast 4 car trains along the length of the subway, with transfers to street lines. That would prevent a single street-level train from backing up the whole system. http://newmunimetro.com/m-market/
You still end up with the service irregularities on the surface sections, unless those rights of way are dedicated. Something which really should have happened long ago on Geary and Irving/Judah, 3rd St., etc. Maybe with the dedicated transit route on Market the idea will spread.
Extending the subway further out is another option, though expensive and fairly unlikely.
With land based transit competition it is really hard to compete because land within walking distance is finite. (if you don't demand walking distance you get less riders by a lot). Thus to have real competition you need to have extremely high density - 50 story apartment buildings with few parks or other open space, at that point one line cannot handle all the riders and a second line can compete.
It's interesting to wonder why. I think one aspect is the degree to which politically powerful are willing to fight it. Famously Stalin actually cared that the Moscow metro worked well, and it did, in a country otherwise crippled by complacent behemoths.
Perhaps the Parisian elite likewise take more pride in having a metro which works OK, are willing to spend more political capital fighting for it. They feel some obligation to keep up with Brussels & Berlin, perhaps that substitutes for competition?
I have seen a lot of explanations of why the US pays so much more - they tend to not hold up. Note that last time congress asked the question the bill did not allow examining non-US construction for the report - something to write your congressman about.
Literally any amount spent on the subway will be returned in rent to landlords. You're just looking from the wrong perspective.
By who? And why should those that value it more than choice for the consumer value choice for the consumer more? And how would they even go about doing that?
In what sense? I work with a lot of Aerospace, Transportion and Logistics companies and I've personally seen tens of hundreds of companies that are suppliers for Boeing/Airbus. What do you think GE, United Technologies, Rolls Royce Aerospace, etc. all do?
One of the reason SpaceX has been abled to save so much cost was that they made / design all the parts themselves, truly vertically integrated. And this has led to better design, lower cost, higher level of knowledge in every part of the system, and more innovation.
I remember there were so regulation that forbid AirCraft manufactures to do that, what was the rationale behind it?
Do you have a source for that? Even Tesla isn't really that vertically integrated (for example - its Gigafactory is a JV with Panasonic).
There were also numerous article and Interview from Elon Musk himself confirming that.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-spacex-reinvented-rock...
> Because SpaceX is a private company, it has not divulged the secret to its pricing.
?
> There were also numerous article and Interview from Elon Musk himself confirming that.
Do you honestly believe everything Musk says? He has a history of embellishing the truth.
I'm not saying SpaceX isn't vertically integrated, I just find claims surrounding anything Musk says dubious unless it's confirmed by 3rd party reporters.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2011/02/04/2014130646...
If vertical integration is always good, the ideal situation is a single producer for any kind of product and no suppliers, which doesn't seem to work too well either.
In markets where firms have market power, there is an explicit and well-studied phenomenon known as "double marginalization"[1][2], which is what the parent comment is describing. Vertical integration is one possible solution to this problem, although there are other approaches as well.
Double marginalization also occurs elsewhere in the air travel industry. Imagine I flew on American Airlines from Charlotte to London, and then continued on British Airways from London to Lyon. If both airlines set their prices independently, then they would both add a markup, and the combined price of the itinerary would be higher than the profit-maximizing price that a single airline would set. In this situation, antitrust authorities will often allow the airlines to form a joint venture and coordinate on price-setting. This reduces horizontal competition (because e.g. AA and BA are no longer competing with one another for passengers on JFK-LHR), but can provide consumer benefits if eliminating double marginalization allows airlines to set their prices lower on multi-airline itineraries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_marginalization
[2] https://mru.org/courses/development-economics/double-margina...
In a few cases, economic theories do a passable job of roughly mirroring real-world behavior, but that's the exception and not the rule.
When a principle is violated marginally, conclusions made based on the principle are themselves violated marginally. You can't write off chemistry because relativistic effects violate the conservation of mass any more than you can write off economics because no two soup cans are identical.
This is a crucial point that so many people seem to miss. If you want to break up these companies (manufacturers, banks), they are going to get absolutely crushed in the global economy, competing against Chinese state-sponsored companies.
In the game theory of open global commerce, it pays to cheat.
You really have to be ignorant about that industry to say that.
Has happened to countless engineering, manufacturing, chemical and tech here in Europe. I suspect it would already have happened with most of the last remaining defence players were they not defence players.
We're starting to see similar now China has risen as far as they have. Real competition is really, really unpopular in today's world.
Something is missing from your argument.