I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands out in my memories:
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
French engineers were known for their willingness to embrace advanced, high-risk technologies to gain a decisive advantage in the aerospace market.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
Yes. Also the way how internal collaboration works. A lot of focus on relationship building and pre-alignments vs a content-first approach („people will accept it if it’s just correct enough“). In any real-world situation that matters it will always take a bit of both
There was that problem with CAD software on the A380: German teams used CATIA version 4, while French had upgraded to version 5, resulting in incompatibilities.
"By late autumn, a team of around 200 German mechanics was in Toulouse along with several hundred kilometers of electrical cables to be installed in the first planes. But after weeks of painstakingly threading thousands of veins of copper and aluminum wire around the walls and floor panels of the airframes, the teams had run into a maddening snag: the cables were too short.
"The wiring wasn't following the expected routing through the fuselage, so when we got to the end they weren't long enough to meet up with the connectors on the next section," said one German mechanic, who said he arrived in Toulouse in early 2005. He asked not to be identified out of fear that he might lose his job. "The calculations were wrong," he said. "Everything had to be ripped out and replaced from scratch." --- nytimes https://archive.vn/uLIqa#selection-603.204-617.419
What’s your source for that? It reads like a cliché, especially when you know about the arguably stronger engineering background in France when it comes to aerospace.
In France we're creative but sloppy, in Germany they care about the process too much but they don't deviate from plans. It's nice to have both: what's the point of following the plan if the entire project is pointless ? French people would challenge early and often, while germans would implement correctly and to the letter.
I really feel we complement each other, each time I work with germans they fix my tendency to be quick and dirty and I push them to accelerate and take shortcuts when they make sense.
That started before airbus. People forget that Aerospatiale (a founder of airbus) was a partner in Concord (aka Concorde). That is where cross-boarder aerospace really got started. Many saw such partnerships as key to keeping Europe together politically. Without Concorde-Airbus, europe might have looked very different.
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
That level of sniping also means that groupthink can't happen, which is a major problem at Boeing: nobody wanted to speak up about obvious problems, and those that did saw their careers ended.
It’s fair to describe Boeing’s problems as being caused by Boeing now being actually McDonnell Douglas. It’s only called Boeing because MD had a terrible reputation.
Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.
And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.
Office politics, I guess, though it was kind of tinged since the offices were in different countries, but it still was Airbus-level, not nation-level, I guess.
While there is some amount of sniping and banter everywhere whenever Americans and French will have different ways of expressing " this is 90% great" or "this is only 10% usable"
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
If we talk about the same „innovation“ offshoot, it happened right after I left the company. I think the cultural change that the top leadership at that time wanted to push was just too much to not cause a backlash. A new CTO who was perceived as an outsider, a somewhat implied message that the Silicon Valley’s way of working was superior to the company‘s traditional approach, and the internal realization that Airbus started to lag behind leading to the typical defensive behaviors. Curious how the culture evolved since then
I left A^3 (or Acubed, groan) 5 years ago, to relocate overseas, so I don't know how it's been since. There was definitely a bit of a "Silicon Valley knows best" attitude that I didn't buy into (because the people I met at Airbus were pretty damn sharp ... while I felt very overpaid, but anyway).
There was always some talk of maneuvering around other groups who wanted our project or wanted to beat us to the punch or whatever, which felt a bit pointlessly unproductive to me, so I did my best to ignore it and try to just deliver.
I did get to meet some cool people, though, including Grazia Vittadini, so I can't complain.
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher, the rocket thing is their side show and a way to subsidize our nuclear launcher development not the other way around.
Also ag studied a reusable launcher in the early 2000s and found it not viable economically, because it wasn't, to make it work space x had to have massive government subsidies in guaranteed launch AND starlink which was essentially let our own investors and the dod feed the finance of space x until it's viable. Which is a good strategy mind you, but as a result pointing the finger at ag being supported by government funding as if it was a bad sign is rather absurd.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
For the past 18 years at least, France has been trapped in an economic stagnation driven by terrible economic policies (as if trying to outcompete eastern Europe on cost wasn't a great idea). The only thing that keeps the economist from collapsing entirely is the perpetual stimulus from public spending using foreign loans. (This also will probably stop being sufficient soon since the governing party seems to be obsessed by the idea of reducing public spending instead of fixing their economic policy).
Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years, in fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s, and in 2020 for the first time since the turn of the century our deficit was reaching a point allowing our debt to start lowering instead of climbing, and was stopped by a combination of both covid and then the energy crisis and the cover offered to french people.
We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others), but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
Inflation != currency devaluation and France had a pretty tame inflation compared to many of its neighbors (significantly less than Belgium for instance), which again is a good illustration that inflation has nothing to do with the money supply or the value of a currency, no matter how prevalent this myth is.
Neither which is the same as expanding the monetary base (debasement if you want to be spicy).
An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.
> Neither which is the same as expanding the monetary base (debasement if you want to be spicy).
“debasement” proper is also something else.
> An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.
Yes. And an economy with a growing money supply can experience inflation and having a strong currency at the same time (see what happened to the US and the US Dollar in the first half of 2022).
> By 2021 it had increased by same % as 2009 to 2015.
It increased faster but the money supply variation was in the same ballpark, when the CPI evolution definitely wasn't (you can compare CPI between 2009 and 2015 and 2019-2021 you'll see that there's no link between inflation and the money supply).
> Not massive inflation in asset prices. All that money had to go somewhere, so stocks are now significantly overvalued and housing is unaffordable.
This has nothing to do with “inflation” (which, by definition is the evolution of CPI).
And the solution to this problem is actually quite simple: tax the rich (who got their free central bank money from nothing in exchange).
> Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years
I'd be happy to live in a timeline where the Economist criticizes the bullshit that “supply chain economics” is, but if you paid attention you'd be aware that it's not really their editorial line.
> fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s
You should thank the boomers for retiring, not the economic policy. (By the way, employment went up in pretty much all of Europe for the 2010-2020 period while the economy stagnated in most places but the east)
> We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others
Standoff caused exactly by the government dogmatic stand over their failed economic policy …
> but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
It is not, this is government narrative. The “pension problem” is merely an economic activity problem. When the real wages go down (which is did in France since 2017) while pensions are inflation adjusted, obviously the share of income that goes through pensions increases but that's not a “pensions problem” it's a wage issue (and economy health issue).
In fact, public spending per capita is in the middle of what remwins of the EU15 (just above all other Mediterranean countries and below all the others). The reason why the spendings per capita ratio is too high is not because the spendings are too high, but because the GDP is far too low due to inept policies.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Yes, by borrowing. Any meaningful reforms seems infeasible due to social and political reasons.
> Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher
Yes, so we agree its hardly much more than a government military contractor making its money from legacy products and not some sort of an innovative company.
It's just an orbital launch vehicle. Something the US can produce by dozens per day it needed. Whereas the French have a stockpile which is no more than 50 with a production rate of maybe 1 or 2 per month.
NASA once offered the UK to launch its satellites almost for free. That offer was rescinded as soon as the UK abandoned its national space program. [1]
From a European perspective, it’s impossible to look at the current situation and believe it would be the same without Ariane 6, even if Ariane 6 itself isn’t particularly competitive. Sovereign access to space is invaluable. Once you lose it, you hand an extraordinary amount of leverage to the White House. And make no mistake: that leverage will be used, whatever the color of the administration.
Yes, that’s not the point I was trying to make, though. But in a way Arianespace doesn’t really need to innovate or compete because because they’ll always have funding due to these legitimate strategic reasons
I have met many former Airbus engineers and former Airbus contractors. Every single time I have heard nothing but bad things about the company.
Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace.
In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be a challenge.
Super sorry that these have been your experiences. Working for a very different company now, I again ended up in a highly international setting and - with good leadership - it can be incredibly enriching (the company is the result of several global mergers). Unfortunately, the way it works in many companies nowadays, the only situation where teams experience working with other countries are in settings that are imbalanced from the start (e.g., after offshoring)
Dealing with offshoring was very tedious, as you now have even more layers. Digital only communication, time differences, etc.
But in person is also very bad. I never was part of a well functioning multi cultural team. And every homogenous team I have been in was well functioning. At this point I will actively seek out employment in teams where I am only among native speakers and as far as possible only among natives.
>Super sorry
What are you sorry about? I quit the job, partly because I couldn't stand having half a dozen different communication barriers.
>it can be incredibly enriching
I have never found a single positive aspect. None of the multi cultural teams have "enriched" me in any way, most often they made me dislike the other cultures.
This article is pushing its narrative so hard that it feels like the author's selection process was "I want to say something about Europe, which company would support my claims".
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
I would love to read an indepth article comparing how the US is whiffing EVs compared to China. Manufacturer attitudes, protectionism, government policies on vehicles and the background on renewable energy.
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
This really isn't an accurate description of what happened. In fact, the contrast between Boeing and Airbus is instructive. Boeing is exactly what happens in the event of unregulated capitalism, which is endless mergers and attempts to exploit monopoly power and relentless efforts to satisfy the financial sector.
The end state of unregulated capitalism for a company like Boeing is a “capital-light” company based entirely on monopoly power and relationships that hardly manufactures anything at all, having outsourced everything to subsidiaries and suppliers to satisfy the return on capital requirements of Wall Street.
The Airbus approach is a clear contrast to this. The fact that Boeing has imploded while Airbus has thrived is, in fact, a very helpful counterpoint to reflexive and idiotic market fundamentalist ideology.
Boeing was also pressured to outsource world wide, to spread around the grease to countries with large aircraft orders. They they didn't outsource because it made sense. They outsourced to get the sales guy his sale, and management their numbers to unlock compensation.
My buddy refused to work there just because of the nightmare of trying to certify it all/ensure compliance at every point.
Airbus is currently less of a problem because they more recently had huge issues/lost their minds, so they’re more on top of it right now.
But it wasn’t that long ago they were literally faking black box data to cover their ass when their one of their new line of aircraft crashed at an airshow.. I don’t think Boeing ever went to that extent, but I guess we’d never know unless they did it particularly badly.
Any sufficiently large/important organization tends to do stuff like this unless it is actively stopped. A generation or so is usually enough for people to forget important lessons.
Airbus literally is the result of mergers of many countries aircraft manufacturers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus], including - from that list, Messerschmitt.
In capitalist systems. Boeing is also still a going concern, and is a major competitor to Airbus. It hasn’t ’imploded’.
It is having some difficulty right now - but more due to the entire US economy going through a ‘narcissistic’ phase.
Airbus has plenty of issues a decade or two ago, including very similar issues to what Boeing has recently been going through.
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
Yes. The problem wasn’t the airframe, nor even frankly the engines, it was the combination plus the decision to fix an aerodynamic instability with an undocumented software patch.
That last part is key: the MCAS system was designed to fake handling like the older planes but they skimped on safety to save the cost of a second sensor and didn’t train pilots on it or have an override mechanism. If the whole thing had been aboveboard they’d have saved so many lives…
There was an override system, MCAS drove the stabiliser trim motors and so flipping the stabiliser trim motor cutout switches would disable MCAS. This relied on the pilots diagnosing an MCAS runaway as a stabiliser trim runaway and enacting the same checklist.
However, to add insult to injury, the MAX also had another change. In the 737 NG, there were two switches, one would disable automated movement of stabiliser trim, the other would cutout the electric trim motors entirely. This allowed the pilots to disable automation without losing the ability to trim the aircraft using the switches on the yoke.
The MAX changed this arrangement, now either switch would cut power to electric trim. Tragically the pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 recognised the runaway, enacted the correct checklist, but the aircraft was now so far out of trim that aerodynamic loads made correcting the situation using the hand trim crank impossible. In desperation the pilots restored electrical power to the trim motors, MCAS re-engaged and drove the aircraft into the ground.
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster), you'd have to replace the landing gear, and with that you'd also need to make changes to the airframe itself.
> Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster)
You’re describing an introduced aerodynamic instability. Not an airframe issue. (Misconfiguring the airframe with non-airframe modifications doesn’t count as an airframe failure.)
Analogy: most Linux kernels are not real time. If I run a non-RT Linux in a real-time use case, that doesn’t make the kernel crap. (You probably used it because it’s popular!) It does mean you used it wrong.
737 Max was fundamentally fucked. But it was fucked because it tried to retain a great and proven airframe with incompatible components. The problem isn’t Boeing producing bad airframes. (787 is also a great airframe.) It’s Boeing integrating terribly.
Missing this distinction misses a critical point about the 737 Max’s failure. (It’s also not necessary to understand it the way an aerospace engineer and pilot might. But then don’t misuse, and then double down on misusing, technical terminology.)
You're just clinging to definition while missing the actual issue.
For the 737 to compete with the A320neo, it required much larger engines.
For those engines to fit, they'd either have to raise the landing gear and redesign the airframe to accommodate the changes (which would be a very different airframe), or they'd have to offset the engines (which massively increases the stall risk and lead to the MAX disaster).
This is not an integration issue. There is no possible way for the 737 to fulfill the needs of the 21st century without becoming an entirely different plane.
The 737’s airframe’s excellence is the reason Boeing was loath to let it go. It’s a really good airframe, and a market fit to boot for the transition from hub and spoke. A clean-sheet design for the 737 would look a lot like the 737. That is what makes the shortcuts tempting.
Engines, avionics and control software are distinct components and not part of the airframe. (Debatable only on engine cowlings and mounts. Neither of which were relevant to the 737 Max’s faults.)
Southwest's 737 MAX contract had a penalty clause of $1 million per aircraft that would trigger if Boeing's delivery contract for the 737 MAX failed to meet certain standards, particularly Southwest's insistence that no flight simulator training be required for the MAX
Meaning, the roots of the “no new type rating” requirement come from Southwest, not Boeing.
This is an interesting detail I had not heard. Can you link to a backstory on this? Why would such a contract ever be signed (especially for a technological product)?
Basically they were looking for an edge against Airbus and a really big one was being able to promise that pilots wouldn’t need a separate certification from the existing 737, which is where that MCAS software came in trying to make the new hardware behave like the existing planes. The allegations about Southwest in particular got the most attention in this lawsuit:
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.
20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.
386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.
561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.
1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.
Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).
The Concorde numbers are so low the confidence interval is much larger than the others. It could be a freak accident there was only one catastrophic failure. And, mind you, that catastrophic failure was a pretty freakish accident itself.
It’d be fair to say it’s one of the few government-sponsored multinational companies that thrived. There was a time European governments pushed for strategic mergers to better compete against American companies.
The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.
My overall feeling is "did they take off, or did Boeing stumble?", but looking at that chart of deliveries it seems Airbus started taking off almost 25 years ago. So the recent struggles of Boeing would really be just the straw that broke the camel's back. My guess is Airbus will dominate for the next few decades.
I think this is about right. About a quarter-century ago, airbus finally became a manufacturer that could go head to head with the 737 and win more often than not. Since then they’ve generally gone from strength to strength while Boeing has been primarily concerned with financial engineering.
It is quite simple, they had the more recent cleansheet single aisle airframe design with enough ground clearance for modern high bypass engine designs. This has baked in a lot of inherent efficiencies including manufacturability meanwhile Boeing leadership refused to invest in a 737 replacement needed in the 2000s.
Don't forget the greatest stumble with the Bombardier CSeries.
I feel like if Boeing shut their mouth and bit their tongue at a little casual dumping they wouldn't have ended up with Airbus taking over the CS100 and adding yet another directly competitive aircraft into an "all Airbus" lineup that Boeing didn't have.
It's simply a company that operates in a rare industry where safety and reliability is more important than time to market or cost. Which makes risk-averse, hyper-conservative and consensus-seeking European culture at a relative advantage vs American "fake it till you make it" one.
Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture. It makes sense that it would excel at an industry that requires putting safety above everything.
The article says they did a lot of customer research and even lobbying, leading to fuel efficiency focus and reduced size, and sticking the finger up to various offended European countries (not taking delegates to US, eschewing RR engines). This seems like savvy being sustained over decades. It must be cultural.
Even if you ask every person to walk the earth what they want, that won't allow you to know future demand. The market shifted largely from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point during development. Without the benefit of hindsight, it must have looked like a solid bet.
A380 was also the result of "customer interviews", but after all the years needed to complete the project the customers have changed their mind, preferring direct flights over hub-and-spoke flights.
When A380 started, and even when it was delivered first, the answers to "what will be the preferred form of airline transport network organisation, in detail" was not yet fully answered.
And A380 simultaneously served as base (in many critical areas) for the quite quickly made A350 et al
IMHO Europe changed massively since the 80s and 90s in that regard, though.
Arianespace was pretty much SpaceX of the 80s and there were quite a few tech companies back then. Due to various reasons stagnation entirely took over Europe after the start of this millennium. Hard to say why. Certainly not putting all the blame on them (since Britain isn't doing that great either) but I don't think especially the Euro and the EU becoming much stronger helped.
I wouldn't say so confidently that Airbus is better than Boeing. Its just better than Boeing at THIS moment. They've been trading places over the decades. A company selling commercial airliners is really only as good as the order book for its latest aircraft. And a single stumble in developing a model can sink your orderbook for an entire decade or more.
Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.
Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.
There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.
Isn't Airbus also just succeedingcompany to Sud Aviation and Aerospatiale? They've done Caravel jetliner, Exocet missile, Puma helicopter, early Ariane rockets, etc etc, by the time they started working on A300... Having such experiences would certainly help designing and delivering great airliners.
A quick control-F didn't find the name John Leahy. Without that part of the story, I think you really miss what took Airbus from an also-run European institution to a global force. Some of his story there is really something.
There is also the idea that innovation is hard in established organisations. William Langewiesche's book "fly by wire" highlights some of the improvements that Boeing no dought knew about, but hadn't got round to. They were busy playing catch-up.
> They also mastered the world of DC lobbying, successfully outmaneuvering Boeing and Lockheed’s attempts to use anti-trust regulations to shut the European entrant out of the US market.
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.
Bribes. Europe has (or had in the past) very different rules about bribery, especially overseas.
I know the American company I worked for lost bids we had won when we refused the kickback schemes the government that granted the bids expected us to include. Some American companies package/tie deals to other deals with other foreign entities so that the kickbacks happen on the side, but it's nothing like the bribery the Europeans did that we had to compete with.
I think more truth would be shown by critiquing Boeing's organizational culture that allowed this decline. In particular does it have the chops to get over its lethargy? No doubt boeing has earned a negative assessment. Now what?
My recollection was Airbus had boeing at a competitive disadvantage and a number of factors combined to optimize for short-term benefit not medium to long with severe consequences. So what about that boeing?
It may be painful to admit, but the Airbus model simply works better than the Boeing model. Whatever advantages America has, they don't apply to commercial/passenger aerospace anymore.
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but this concluding sentence annoyed me greatly:
> Governments are generally better at supporting companies in established markets where innovation takes place slowly and incrementally. This is likely why state-backed efforts have found it easier to be competitive against aerospace companies than Silicon Valley giants working at breakneck pace
I always finds it fascinating that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft (granted the later isn't a “silicon valley giant” proper) managed to build a narrative portraying themselves as “innovative companies” when they are the opposite of that: they are, and have been for almost two decades now or even more for Microsoft, very close to the complacent and short-term-profit-maximizer Boeing portrayed in this article.
They just happen to benefit from a much stronger network effect than Boeing, and work in a business where economies of scale are insane.
When you really think of those companies they mostly seem stagnant. They buy other companies, but for innovative company with essentially unlimited amounts of resources. Wouldn't you expect a big innovation at least say every other year?
Which is why Airbus is around today. The amount of launch aide (including Marshall plan dollars!) that the European governments flushed into Airbus to keep them afloat for years is why they are still around.\
It's going to be interesting to watch COMAC really get going. They've been struggling for 17 years now to get the C919 into service. It's still using a US engine (currently embargoed by Trump, but that may change). The Aero Engine Corporation of China has built an engine which is supposed to be flight tested "soon".
There was also residual suspicion of European industry among US airliners. [...]
Against this backdrop, Airbus did everything it could to deemphasize its European heritage as it toured the US.
The European tech industry on the other hand managed to curb that suspicion by becoming a complete non-threat.
I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands out in my memories:
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
How would you say their cultures compliment each other? I would be interested to hear more concrete, and especially how it ends up when you mix them.
French engineers were known for their willingness to embrace advanced, high-risk technologies to gain a decisive advantage in the aerospace market.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
Yes. Also the way how internal collaboration works. A lot of focus on relationship building and pre-alignments vs a content-first approach („people will accept it if it’s just correct enough“). In any real-world situation that matters it will always take a bit of both
There was that problem with CAD software on the A380: German teams used CATIA version 4, while French had upgraded to version 5, resulting in incompatibilities.
"By late autumn, a team of around 200 German mechanics was in Toulouse along with several hundred kilometers of electrical cables to be installed in the first planes. But after weeks of painstakingly threading thousands of veins of copper and aluminum wire around the walls and floor panels of the airframes, the teams had run into a maddening snag: the cables were too short.
"The wiring wasn't following the expected routing through the fuselage, so when we got to the end they weren't long enough to meet up with the connectors on the next section," said one German mechanic, who said he arrived in Toulouse in early 2005. He asked not to be identified out of fear that he might lose his job. "The calculations were wrong," he said. "Everything had to be ripped out and replaced from scratch." --- nytimes https://archive.vn/uLIqa#selection-603.204-617.419
Mistakes happen on large, highly complex projects involving multiple teams in multiple locations ?
Colour me surprised !
> Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
Airbus uses US measurements - i.e., not the metric system?
They use SAE nuts and bolts. "Society of Automotive Engineers and refers to the system of inch-based fasteners used primarily in North America"
Is that the standard in the airline industry? For example, does Embraer use SAE too? Lockheed (I thought the US military used metric)?
Dunno. My info's from https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmaintenance/comments/botlch...
Update - google says Embraer uses SAE. Apparently Airbus helicopters are metric though.
[dead]
I'm speechless
What’s your source for that? It reads like a cliché, especially when you know about the arguably stronger engineering background in France when it comes to aerospace.
Seconding this, I'm Dutch and I still struggle to see how they'd complement each other.
Well that's just because you hate both the French and the Germans ;)
In France we're creative but sloppy, in Germany they care about the process too much but they don't deviate from plans. It's nice to have both: what's the point of following the plan if the entire project is pointless ? French people would challenge early and often, while germans would implement correctly and to the letter.
I really feel we complement each other, each time I work with germans they fix my tendency to be quick and dirty and I push them to accelerate and take shortcuts when they make sense.
Ah, I see! That's cool.
That started before airbus. People forget that Aerospatiale (a founder of airbus) was a partner in Concord (aka Concorde). That is where cross-boarder aerospace really got started. Many saw such partnerships as key to keeping Europe together politically. Without Concorde-Airbus, europe might have looked very different.
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
That level of sniping also means that groupthink can't happen, which is a major problem at Boeing: nobody wanted to speak up about obvious problems, and those that did saw their careers ended.
It’s fair to describe Boeing’s problems as being caused by Boeing now being actually McDonnell Douglas. It’s only called Boeing because MD had a terrible reputation.
Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.
Maybe, yeah.
And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.
I just remember being shocked by the negativity.
Was that country political politics or office politics politics?
Office politics, I guess, though it was kind of tinged since the offices were in different countries, but it still was Airbus-level, not nation-level, I guess.
While there is some amount of sniping and banter everywhere whenever Americans and French will have different ways of expressing " this is 90% great" or "this is only 10% usable"
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
IDK, I'm French, and worked in the US and I can't say my perception of the US way of working generally matches yours.
I've never worked in France so I can't compare there.
If we talk about the same „innovation“ offshoot, it happened right after I left the company. I think the cultural change that the top leadership at that time wanted to push was just too much to not cause a backlash. A new CTO who was perceived as an outsider, a somewhat implied message that the Silicon Valley’s way of working was superior to the company‘s traditional approach, and the internal realization that Airbus started to lag behind leading to the typical defensive behaviors. Curious how the culture evolved since then
I left A^3 (or Acubed, groan) 5 years ago, to relocate overseas, so I don't know how it's been since. There was definitely a bit of a "Silicon Valley knows best" attitude that I didn't buy into (because the people I met at Airbus were pretty damn sharp ... while I felt very overpaid, but anyway).
There was always some talk of maneuvering around other groups who wanted our project or wanted to beat us to the punch or whatever, which felt a bit pointlessly unproductive to me, so I did my best to ignore it and try to just deliver.
I did get to meet some cool people, though, including Grazia Vittadini, so I can't complain.
> I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project
Cf Arianespace.
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher, the rocket thing is their side show and a way to subsidize our nuclear launcher development not the other way around.
Also ag studied a reusable launcher in the early 2000s and found it not viable economically, because it wasn't, to make it work space x had to have massive government subsidies in guaranteed launch AND starlink which was essentially let our own investors and the dod feed the finance of space x until it's viable. Which is a good strategy mind you, but as a result pointing the finger at ag being supported by government funding as if it was a bad sign is rather absurd.
SpaceX had to sue the government to launch for them.
For those who don't know, the DOD didn't finance SpaceX or Starlink or reusability.
This claim is total nonsense that started as Russian propaganda.
You'll notice the DOD refused to finance Starlink in Ukraine when they were asked to.
So much for subsidies.
SpaceX was all customer and investor funded.
Starlink was funded by Google and Fidelity.
Reusability was funded via income.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
For the past 18 years at least, France has been trapped in an economic stagnation driven by terrible economic policies (as if trying to outcompete eastern Europe on cost wasn't a great idea). The only thing that keeps the economist from collapsing entirely is the perpetual stimulus from public spending using foreign loans. (This also will probably stop being sufficient soon since the governing party seems to be obsessed by the idea of reducing public spending instead of fixing their economic policy).
Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years, in fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s, and in 2020 for the first time since the turn of the century our deficit was reaching a point allowing our debt to start lowering instead of climbing, and was stopped by a combination of both covid and then the energy crisis and the cover offered to french people.
We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others), but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
You forgot to mention that in 2020 currencies were devalued through severe QE, which means it is easier in 2025 to pay back 2M EUR than it was in 2020
Inflation != currency devaluation and France had a pretty tame inflation compared to many of its neighbors (significantly less than Belgium for instance), which again is a good illustration that inflation has nothing to do with the money supply or the value of a currency, no matter how prevalent this myth is.
> Inflation != currency devaluation
Neither which is the same as expanding the monetary base (debasement if you want to be spicy).
An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.
> Neither which is the same as expanding the monetary base (debasement if you want to be spicy).
“debasement” proper is also something else.
> An economy with a shrinking money supply can experience inflation and devaluation relative to other currencies. An economy with a growing money supply can experience deflation and a strong currency.
Yes. And an economy with a growing money supply can experience inflation and having a strong currency at the same time (see what happened to the US and the US Dollar in the first half of 2022).
Check the money supply during COVID, it was insane.
Check the money supply after the financial crisis, it was insane too and the inflation remained below target for a decade.
Covid induced inflation has nothing to do with the money supply and all to do with supply chain disruption.
> was insane too
Not even remotely close to 2020-21 though.
M2 supply increased by the same proportion between Feb and June 2020 as between 2009 and 2013.
By 2021 it had increased by same % as 2009 to 2015.
> and all to do with supply chain disruption
Not massive inflation in asset prices. All that money had to go somewhere, so stocks are now significantly overvalued and housing is unaffordable.
> Not even remotely close to 2020-21 though
Yes it has, and you show it right below:
> By 2021 it had increased by same % as 2009 to 2015.
It increased faster but the money supply variation was in the same ballpark, when the CPI evolution definitely wasn't (you can compare CPI between 2009 and 2015 and 2019-2021 you'll see that there's no link between inflation and the money supply).
> Not massive inflation in asset prices. All that money had to go somewhere, so stocks are now significantly overvalued and housing is unaffordable.
This has nothing to do with “inflation” (which, by definition is the evolution of CPI).
And the solution to this problem is actually quite simple: tax the rich (who got their free central bank money from nothing in exchange).
> This has nothing to do with “inflation” (which, by definition is the evolution of CPI).
Housing is part of the CPI. And no, the “inflation” is not be definition equivalent to CPI inflation.
> you'll see that there's no link between inflation and the money supply).
Making conclusions like that from a single datapoint is not particularly scientific.
> Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years
I'd be happy to live in a timeline where the Economist criticizes the bullshit that “supply chain economics” is, but if you paid attention you'd be aware that it's not really their editorial line.
> fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s
You should thank the boomers for retiring, not the economic policy. (By the way, employment went up in pretty much all of Europe for the 2010-2020 period while the economy stagnated in most places but the east)
> We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others
Standoff caused exactly by the government dogmatic stand over their failed economic policy …
> but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
It is not, this is government narrative. The “pension problem” is merely an economic activity problem. When the real wages go down (which is did in France since 2017) while pensions are inflation adjusted, obviously the share of income that goes through pensions increases but that's not a “pensions problem” it's a wage issue (and economy health issue).
In fact, public spending per capita is in the middle of what remwins of the EU15 (just above all other Mediterranean countries and below all the others). The reason why the spendings per capita ratio is too high is not because the spendings are too high, but because the GDP is far too low due to inept policies.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Yes, by borrowing. Any meaningful reforms seems infeasible due to social and political reasons.
> Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher
Yes, so we agree its hardly much more than a government military contractor making its money from legacy products and not some sort of an innovative company.
I wouldn't exactly call the world's fastest ballistic missile (Mach 25!) a legacy product...
It's just an orbital launch vehicle. Something the US can produce by dozens per day it needed. Whereas the French have a stockpile which is no more than 50 with a production rate of maybe 1 or 2 per month.
The US one is slower...
That kind of delta-v makes it almost an orbital launcher.
NASA once offered the UK to launch its satellites almost for free. That offer was rescinded as soon as the UK abandoned its national space program. [1]
From a European perspective, it’s impossible to look at the current situation and believe it would be the same without Ariane 6, even if Ariane 6 itself isn’t particularly competitive. Sovereign access to space is invaluable. Once you lose it, you hand an extraordinary amount of leverage to the White House. And make no mistake: that leverage will be used, whatever the color of the administration.
[1] https://curious-droid.com/323/black-arrow-lipstick-rocket-br...
Yes, that’s not the point I was trying to make, though. But in a way Arianespace doesn’t really need to innovate or compete because because they’ll always have funding due to these legitimate strategic reasons
I have met many former Airbus engineers and former Airbus contractors. Every single time I have heard nothing but bad things about the company.
Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace.
In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be a challenge.
Super sorry that these have been your experiences. Working for a very different company now, I again ended up in a highly international setting and - with good leadership - it can be incredibly enriching (the company is the result of several global mergers). Unfortunately, the way it works in many companies nowadays, the only situation where teams experience working with other countries are in settings that are imbalanced from the start (e.g., after offshoring)
Dealing with offshoring was very tedious, as you now have even more layers. Digital only communication, time differences, etc.
But in person is also very bad. I never was part of a well functioning multi cultural team. And every homogenous team I have been in was well functioning. At this point I will actively seek out employment in teams where I am only among native speakers and as far as possible only among natives.
>Super sorry
What are you sorry about? I quit the job, partly because I couldn't stand having half a dozen different communication barriers.
>it can be incredibly enriching
I have never found a single positive aspect. None of the multi cultural teams have "enriched" me in any way, most often they made me dislike the other cultures.
This article is pushing its narrative so hard that it feels like the author's selection process was "I want to say something about Europe, which company would support my claims".
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
I would love to read an indepth article comparing how the US is whiffing EVs compared to China. Manufacturer attitudes, protectionism, government policies on vehicles and the background on renewable energy.
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
They became monopolies/state sponsored entities.
It happens everywhere under every market system.
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
This really isn't an accurate description of what happened. In fact, the contrast between Boeing and Airbus is instructive. Boeing is exactly what happens in the event of unregulated capitalism, which is endless mergers and attempts to exploit monopoly power and relentless efforts to satisfy the financial sector.
The end state of unregulated capitalism for a company like Boeing is a “capital-light” company based entirely on monopoly power and relationships that hardly manufactures anything at all, having outsourced everything to subsidiaries and suppliers to satisfy the return on capital requirements of Wall Street.
The Airbus approach is a clear contrast to this. The fact that Boeing has imploded while Airbus has thrived is, in fact, a very helpful counterpoint to reflexive and idiotic market fundamentalist ideology.
Boeing was also pressured to outsource world wide, to spread around the grease to countries with large aircraft orders. They they didn't outsource because it made sense. They outsourced to get the sales guy his sale, and management their numbers to unlock compensation.
My buddy refused to work there just because of the nightmare of trying to certify it all/ensure compliance at every point.
That's really not accurate. Yes, that is a thing that also happened, but that's not why Spirit Aerosystems existed, which is what I'm talking about.
It's because Wall Street demands returns on capital in a way that's fundamentally incompatible with hardcore high tech manufacturing.
Airbus does the same thing right now - [https://www.airbus.com/en/products-services/commercial-aircr...].
Airbus is currently less of a problem because they more recently had huge issues/lost their minds, so they’re more on top of it right now.
But it wasn’t that long ago they were literally faking black box data to cover their ass when their one of their new line of aircraft crashed at an airshow.. I don’t think Boeing ever went to that extent, but I guess we’d never know unless they did it particularly badly.
Any sufficiently large/important organization tends to do stuff like this unless it is actively stopped. A generation or so is usually enough for people to forget important lessons.
Airbus literally is the result of mergers of many countries aircraft manufacturers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus], including - from that list, Messerschmitt.
In capitalist systems. Boeing is also still a going concern, and is a major competitor to Airbus. It hasn’t ’imploded’.
It is having some difficulty right now - but more due to the entire US economy going through a ‘narcissistic’ phase.
Airbus has plenty of issues a decade or two ago, including very similar issues to what Boeing has recently been going through.
The problems with Boeing aren’t generic. They’re created by people, and policies.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-a...
The problems Airbus had were also created by people and policies?
History rhymes for a reason.
I don’t think the problems Airbus have had are comparable to the likely criminal, and clearly negligent, meltdown that Boeing has had.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_affair]
[http://www.crashdehabsheim.net/CRenglish%20phot.pdf]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447] - similar type of issue (likely) as the MAX problems. Improper training + bad sensors + design that is too prone to problems.
Just to name a few.
Potentially worse.
What are you talking about? Which airframe scandal?
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
737 Max was a compendium of failures. Airframe wasn’t one of them. If anything, the 737 series’ airframes are perfected to a fault.
Didn't the problems start when Boeing began using new engines on an old airframe for the Max?
https://www.eetimes.com/software-wont-fix-boeings-faulty-air...
Yes. The problem wasn’t the airframe, nor even frankly the engines, it was the combination plus the decision to fix an aerodynamic instability with an undocumented software patch.
That last part is key: the MCAS system was designed to fake handling like the older planes but they skimped on safety to save the cost of a second sensor and didn’t train pilots on it or have an override mechanism. If the whole thing had been aboveboard they’d have saved so many lives…
There was an override system, MCAS drove the stabiliser trim motors and so flipping the stabiliser trim motor cutout switches would disable MCAS. This relied on the pilots diagnosing an MCAS runaway as a stabiliser trim runaway and enacting the same checklist.
However, to add insult to injury, the MAX also had another change. In the 737 NG, there were two switches, one would disable automated movement of stabiliser trim, the other would cutout the electric trim motors entirely. This allowed the pilots to disable automation without losing the ability to trim the aircraft using the switches on the yoke.
The MAX changed this arrangement, now either switch would cut power to electric trim. Tragically the pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 recognised the runaway, enacted the correct checklist, but the aircraft was now so far out of trim that aerodynamic loads made correcting the situation using the hand trim crank impossible. In desperation the pilots restored electrical power to the trim motors, MCAS re-engaged and drove the aircraft into the ground.
And putting certain related functionality behind a paywall.
Tons of problems that only are accepted due being grandfathered in.
> Tons of problems that only are accepted due being grandfathered in
What are you basing this on?
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
> a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max
Instrumentation. Not airframe.
Boeing’s failure was in trying to make a great airframe compensate for failings in other systems.
It is a lackluster airframe but with an entire workforce certified to fly it and thus it is forced to stay around.
Just look at the anti-ice issues preventing 737 Max 7 and 10 to be certified.
> Just look at the anti-ice issues preventing 737 Max 7 and 10 to be certified
Not airframe!
Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster), you'd have to replace the landing gear, and with that you'd also need to make changes to the airframe itself.
> Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster)
You’re describing an introduced aerodynamic instability. Not an airframe issue. (Misconfiguring the airframe with non-airframe modifications doesn’t count as an airframe failure.)
Analogy: most Linux kernels are not real time. If I run a non-RT Linux in a real-time use case, that doesn’t make the kernel crap. (You probably used it because it’s popular!) It does mean you used it wrong.
737 Max was fundamentally fucked. But it was fucked because it tried to retain a great and proven airframe with incompatible components. The problem isn’t Boeing producing bad airframes. (787 is also a great airframe.) It’s Boeing integrating terribly.
Missing this distinction misses a critical point about the 737 Max’s failure. (It’s also not necessary to understand it the way an aerospace engineer and pilot might. But then don’t misuse, and then double down on misusing, technical terminology.)
You're just clinging to definition while missing the actual issue.
For the 737 to compete with the A320neo, it required much larger engines.
For those engines to fit, they'd either have to raise the landing gear and redesign the airframe to accommodate the changes (which would be a very different airframe), or they'd have to offset the engines (which massively increases the stall risk and lead to the MAX disaster).
This is not an integration issue. There is no possible way for the 737 to fulfill the needs of the 21st century without becoming an entirely different plane.
Ignore everything that makes the 737 a modern passenger aircraft and it’s awesome!
> Ignore everything that makes the 737 a modern passenger aircraft and it’s awesome!
You’re moving the goalposts because you didn’t understand what an airframe is.
The engine anti ice system are literally generic aerodynamic parts and control systems provided by Boeing.
You know, part of the same assembly causing MCAS to exist.
But that is of course not part of the airframe.
> that is of course not part of the airframe
Correct.
The 737’s airframe’s excellence is the reason Boeing was loath to let it go. It’s a really good airframe, and a market fit to boot for the transition from hub and spoke. A clean-sheet design for the 737 would look a lot like the 737. That is what makes the shortcuts tempting.
Engines, avionics and control software are distinct components and not part of the airframe. (Debatable only on engine cowlings and mounts. Neither of which were relevant to the 737 Max’s faults.)
Southwest's 737 MAX contract had a penalty clause of $1 million per aircraft that would trigger if Boeing's delivery contract for the 737 MAX failed to meet certain standards, particularly Southwest's insistence that no flight simulator training be required for the MAX
Meaning, the roots of the “no new type rating” requirement come from Southwest, not Boeing.
Presumably Boeing weren't under duress when they signed the contract.
The Boeing execs had their bonuses held against their heads.
Southwest and all the legacy carriers
So, how much they spent with the grounding again?
This is an interesting detail I had not heard. Can you link to a backstory on this? Why would such a contract ever be signed (especially for a technological product)?
There’s a really good podcast episode here:
https://engineered.network/causality/episode-33-737-max/
Basically they were looking for an edge against Airbus and a really big one was being able to promise that pilots wouldn’t need a separate certification from the existing 737, which is where that MCAS software came in trying to make the new hardware behave like the existing planes. The allegations about Southwest in particular got the most attention in this lawsuit:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/legal...
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
You've got the whole thing wrong.
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
> Europe is a graveyard of failed national champions … Airbus is the rare success story.
Oh, come now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.
It is like saying that the tunnel that links the France and Great Britain was a failure
And just some context on the technological side:
20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.
386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.
561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.
1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.
Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).
The Concorde numbers are so low the confidence interval is much larger than the others. It could be a freak accident there was only one catastrophic failure. And, mind you, that catastrophic failure was a pretty freakish accident itself.
Indeed, before that freak accident the Concorde had 0 hull losses. But even with it, it was not out of the ordinary, that's my point.
True. I "feel" it was well engineered and well operated, and, because of that, it had few catastrophic accidents.
But contrast that to the kind of abuse old 737's and A320s need to endure in the hands of less careful operators.
"the rare European company that is better than its American rival" this is a shitpost
It’d be fair to say it’s one of the few government-sponsored multinational companies that thrived. There was a time European governments pushed for strategic mergers to better compete against American companies.
I stopped reading the article after this sentence. Now I am scanning the comments.
The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.
Right, everything must about increasing the scoreboard in the bank UI.
My overall feeling is "did they take off, or did Boeing stumble?", but looking at that chart of deliveries it seems Airbus started taking off almost 25 years ago. So the recent struggles of Boeing would really be just the straw that broke the camel's back. My guess is Airbus will dominate for the next few decades.
I think this is about right. About a quarter-century ago, airbus finally became a manufacturer that could go head to head with the 737 and win more often than not. Since then they’ve generally gone from strength to strength while Boeing has been primarily concerned with financial engineering.
It is quite simple, they had the more recent cleansheet single aisle airframe design with enough ground clearance for modern high bypass engine designs. This has baked in a lot of inherent efficiencies including manufacturability meanwhile Boeing leadership refused to invest in a 737 replacement needed in the 2000s.
Don't forget the greatest stumble with the Bombardier CSeries.
I feel like if Boeing shut their mouth and bit their tongue at a little casual dumping they wouldn't have ended up with Airbus taking over the CS100 and adding yet another directly competitive aircraft into an "all Airbus" lineup that Boeing didn't have.
It's simply a company that operates in a rare industry where safety and reliability is more important than time to market or cost. Which makes risk-averse, hyper-conservative and consensus-seeking European culture at a relative advantage vs American "fake it till you make it" one.
Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture. It makes sense that it would excel at an industry that requires putting safety above everything.
The article says they did a lot of customer research and even lobbying, leading to fuel efficiency focus and reduced size, and sticking the finger up to various offended European countries (not taking delegates to US, eschewing RR engines). This seems like savvy being sustained over decades. It must be cultural.
> and reduced size
After launching, then dropping, the A380. Perhaps they didn’t do enough customer interviews there.
Even if you ask every person to walk the earth what they want, that won't allow you to know future demand. The market shifted largely from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point during development. Without the benefit of hindsight, it must have looked like a solid bet.
This is explained in TFA.
A380 was also the result of "customer interviews", but after all the years needed to complete the project the customers have changed their mind, preferring direct flights over hub-and-spoke flights.
When A380 started, and even when it was delivered first, the answers to "what will be the preferred form of airline transport network organisation, in detail" was not yet fully answered.
And A380 simultaneously served as base (in many critical areas) for the quite quickly made A350 et al
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> Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture.
I mean, in this particular space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
IMHO Europe changed massively since the 80s and 90s in that regard, though.
Arianespace was pretty much SpaceX of the 80s and there were quite a few tech companies back then. Due to various reasons stagnation entirely took over Europe after the start of this millennium. Hard to say why. Certainly not putting all the blame on them (since Britain isn't doing that great either) but I don't think especially the Euro and the EU becoming much stronger helped.
I wouldn't say so confidently that Airbus is better than Boeing. Its just better than Boeing at THIS moment. They've been trading places over the decades. A company selling commercial airliners is really only as good as the order book for its latest aircraft. And a single stumble in developing a model can sink your orderbook for an entire decade or more.
Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.
Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.
There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.
Isn't Airbus also just succeedingcompany to Sud Aviation and Aerospatiale? They've done Caravel jetliner, Exocet missile, Puma helicopter, early Ariane rockets, etc etc, by the time they started working on A300... Having such experiences would certainly help designing and delivering great airliners.
A quick control-F didn't find the name John Leahy. Without that part of the story, I think you really miss what took Airbus from an also-run European institution to a global force. Some of his story there is really something.
There is also the idea that innovation is hard in established organisations. William Langewiesche's book "fly by wire" highlights some of the improvements that Boeing no dought knew about, but hadn't got round to. They were busy playing catch-up.
> They also mastered the world of DC lobbying, successfully outmaneuvering Boeing and Lockheed’s attempts to use anti-trust regulations to shut the European entrant out of the US market.
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.
Bribes. Europe has (or had in the past) very different rules about bribery, especially overseas.
I know the American company I worked for lost bids we had won when we refused the kickback schemes the government that granted the bids expected us to include. Some American companies package/tie deals to other deals with other foreign entities so that the kickbacks happen on the side, but it's nothing like the bribery the Europeans did that we had to compete with.
I think more truth would be shown by critiquing Boeing's organizational culture that allowed this decline. In particular does it have the chops to get over its lethargy? No doubt boeing has earned a negative assessment. Now what?
My recollection was Airbus had boeing at a competitive disadvantage and a number of factors combined to optimize for short-term benefit not medium to long with severe consequences. So what about that boeing?
The chart of Airbus vs Boeing hull sales would have benefited from a center line Airbus above boeing below style.
Stacked charts for two families work better that way than stack from baseline.
It may be painful to admit, but the Airbus model simply works better than the Boeing model. Whatever advantages America has, they don't apply to commercial/passenger aerospace anymore.
There's a very nice video from Mustard about the Airbus story.
https://youtu.be/ln-ffJM9sJc
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but this concluding sentence annoyed me greatly:
> Governments are generally better at supporting companies in established markets where innovation takes place slowly and incrementally. This is likely why state-backed efforts have found it easier to be competitive against aerospace companies than Silicon Valley giants working at breakneck pace
I always finds it fascinating that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft (granted the later isn't a “silicon valley giant” proper) managed to build a narrative portraying themselves as “innovative companies” when they are the opposite of that: they are, and have been for almost two decades now or even more for Microsoft, very close to the complacent and short-term-profit-maximizer Boeing portrayed in this article.
They just happen to benefit from a much stronger network effect than Boeing, and work in a business where economies of scale are insane.
When you really think of those companies they mostly seem stagnant. They buy other companies, but for innovative company with essentially unlimited amounts of resources. Wouldn't you expect a big innovation at least say every other year?
Boeing had a tough patch, but anyone that follows aviation knows Airbus has had its fair share of massive screw-ups over the years too.
It started its engines and left the ground
This seems a little disingenuous - the US taxpayer will always keep Boeing solvent, even if they were down to selling one 737 per year.
Which is why Airbus is around today. The amount of launch aide (including Marshall plan dollars!) that the European governments flushed into Airbus to keep them afloat for years is why they are still around.\
It's going to be interesting to watch COMAC really get going. They've been struggling for 17 years now to get the C919 into service. It's still using a US engine (currently embargoed by Trump, but that may change). The Aero Engine Corporation of China has built an engine which is supposed to be flight tested "soon".
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Tldr: turbine engines