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Boeing played the market correctly here. When everyone was oohing over the A380 Boeing said super jumbos were on their way out and focused on the 787. If it had

Boeing played the market correctly here. When everyone was oohing over the A380 Boeing said super jumbos were on their way out and focused on the 787. If it hadn’t been for Emirates buying so many A380s to begin with it would have been a flop from the start (Emirates alone operates almost half of the A380s ever built). The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design.

zerkten 9y ago
It seems like a company can only make one successful move at a time (in what I find a very ugly) industry. At the lower end Boeing struggles with the 737 being too large for a lot of markets. There Embraer, Bombardier (now part of Airbus), and a bunch of other companies seem to have an opportunity, if they can execute. It'll be interesting to see what Boeing does there given the cozy relationship with Embraer.
- rchowe 9y ago
  Bombardier is not a part of Airbus now, they just sold 50.01% of the C-series program to Airbus so that they could manufacture them in Alabama and dodge the 300% tariff imposed on them by the US government. It is unclear where the C-series airplanes for non-US markets will be made, but it's suspected to still be by Bombardier in Canada.
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    > It is unclear where the C-series airplanes for non-US markets will be made, but it's suspected to still be by Bombardier in Canada. It's pretty clear—Canada. That said, there's a significant change: sales, and post-sales work, will mostly be handled by Airbus, who already have much more contact with many more airlines and leasing companies than Bombardier.
pmcollins 9y ago
Boeing's market analysis said that the market could barely support one super-jumbo, let alone two, so they opted for the much cheaper 747 upgrade and we got the 747-8 (which is also headed for extinction). I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. The optimal size from an efficiency perspective is the much smaller 737 -- the more you deviate from that, the larger the efficiency penalty.
- froindt 9y ago
  >I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. Yep! Aerospace has been on the leading edge of manufacturing methods for many years because of it. Even worse is having a heavy airplane at the start of the flight (the weight is always there). In school we were talking about manufacturing aerospace parts, and the joke is that you always take a nice chunk of aluminum and machine away 85% of the volume. GE has been doing lots of work with metal additive manufacturing, in some cases increasing performance while also decreasing cost. It allows geometries which are otherwise impossible with traditional manufacturing methods. Metal AM is also hella expensive. You won't see tons of metal AM parts on consumer cars anytime soon, as the metal powders and machines are expensive, and production rates are often slow in comparison to traditional manufacturing methods. For reference, my professor passed around a part which weighed around 2 pounds and fit in your hand. The all-in cost to get that printed in steel was around $5,000, and around $8,000 for titanium. https://www.ge.com/reports/epiphany-disruption-ge-additive-chief-explains-3d-printing-will-upend-manufacturing/ https://www.ge.com/reports/epiphany-disruption-ge-additive-c...
  - louithethrid 9y ago
    Never understoood why they would not use the fuel as stability element- basically- the elments carrying the fuelweight, are made from a carbonsponge that holds frozzen fuel..
    - briandear 9y ago
      The complexity and logistical difficulty of what you describe is mind blowing not to mention adding non trivial safety concerns.
namdnay 9y ago
I think that for airlines that want to differentiate on comfort/quality, the A380 is a must-have: You can pimp up the interior of a 787 as much as you want, it will never be as comfortable as what you can do with an A380 (see my other comment on the Emirates A380). However this segment probably isn't big enough to justify such an expensive production line... @frik - for some reason you are "dead" - no-one can see your comments since 5 days ago. Edit: now you're not! Congratulations I guess?
- code4tee 9y ago
  I’ve flown just about every commercial model of airplane made in the last 30 years including Emirates A380 biz class. While that was undoubtedly an amazing trip, it had a lot more to do with the airline than the airplane. My enthusiasm for the trip also dropped off when I had to spend several hours waiting around in the middle of the night at their hub in Dubai.
  - namdnay 9y ago
    Yes! See my other comment - the DXB stopover is their Achilles heel I think.
  - oblio 9y ago
    Why? What happened in Dubai?
    - personlurking 9y ago
      Probably has to do with the way airlines schedule their flights, depending on the final destination and direction. Sometimes you'll catch a flight and can't make a connecting flight for several hours. How Airlines Schedule Flights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGXahSnA_oA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGXahSnA_oA
    - nhf 9y ago
      Many flights in Dubai happen late at night / very early morning due to a combination of time zone alignment and daytime heat making it harder to service large planes.
dawhizkid 9y ago
I don't think they're scrambling. The A350 is their 787 competitor and looks amazing. Can't wait to try it out.
- code4tee 9y ago
  Um, there’s 5 787s flying around for every A350. On the future book Boeing also has around 50% more 787 orders than Airbus has A350. So yeah, I’d call that being a bit behind in that market segment.
  - _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
    It's 1250 to 850 orders.
    - jonknee 9y ago
      And it's 625 to 133 deliveries...
      - masklinn 9y ago
        And it's 2011 to 2015...
    - 24gttghh 9y ago
      850 x .5 = 425 850 + 425 = 1275 Looks pretty damn close to 50% more orders for Boeing, so I'm not sure what you are implying.
      - thisacctforreal 9y ago
        protip: 1250 / 850 = 1.4706, ie 147%
  - tolien 9y ago
    The 787 first flew 4 years earlier too, cost 3x as much to develop and aren’t selling for three times the price. To the end of last month there were 858 orders (133 delivered) for the A350 versus 1287 (625 delivered) for the Dreamliner. Considering the 787 had a head start (787 introduced in 2011, A350 XWB in 2015), the pressure’s on Airbus to keep ramping up deliveries (the last few years it looks like Boeing’s stabilised at ~130 per year) but that gap’s going to shrink pretty quickly…
danmaz74 9y ago
> The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design. Isn't the A350 already a very good contender there?
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  Yes but HN always has been a pro-Boeing board. The A350 has around 850 orders vs. Boeing 1250 orders for their 787. So "scrambling" is highly subjective and suggestive.
ptero 9y ago
> The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design I agree with your first paragraph, but not at all sure about this. Current air transportation is very stratified, but some of its numerous rules could get a major rework in the next N years (N >= 10). Current setup has mid-size sweetspot when optimized on existing rules on routes, airport slots, weather requirements and in general ATC that is over 30 years old. Even if only parts of the plans get accepted they can change optimizations significantly, e.g. if and when Nextgen allows planes fly directly from A to B (instead of along a few pre-defined segments) it might push sweetspot from mostly mid-size to a bimodal distribution: smaller for small airports, larger between main hubs. Or some other way.
- code4tee 9y ago
  It’s actually the airlines dragging their feet on a lot of this, not “30 year old ATC.” Many airlines don’t upgrade their planes to have the latest equipment. Flew in a small personal plane with a friend that’s a pilot and he was explaining how in several areas his small plane has more advanced avionics than commercial airliners. For example, his plane is certified to fly the latest 3D GPS based landing approaches while many commercial airliners still don’t have the necessary equipment onboard.
  - ptero 9y ago
    > It’s actually the airlines dragging their feet on a lot of this, not “30 year old ATC.” Many airlines don’t upgrade their planes to have the latest equipment. Yes, and I believe they do not upgrade because it makes no business sense for them. Regulators say, for example, "install ADS-B so you are compliant with latest standards" which at the moment has no tangible benefits for the airline. If, by installing it airline would get useful additional capabilities, such as being able to fly direct from point A to point B or allow for lower separation I suspect they would upgrade quickly. The above is not (really) bashing ATC -- there is a very low tolerance for mid-air collisions, so regulatory change is very, very slow.
    - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jdietrich 9y ago
There was a shift in the aviation market that wasn't entirely straightforward to predict. Airbus bet that the market would continue with a hub-and-spoke model, with lots of regional jets providing connections to hub airports. Boeing bet that the market would shift towards point-to-point service, with direct flights between second-tier airports facilitated by mid-size jets with extended range. Boeing clearly made the right call, but there's an element of hindsight at play. Emirates, Etihad and Singapore have been very successful as pure hub-and-spoke airlines and there's still a vast amount of traffic going through the major hub airports. The lead time on new aircraft designs is immense - the A3XX project started in 1994 and took the first orders in 2000. Airbus made some strategic blunders and didn't respond quickly enough to market conditions, but in some respects they were just unlucky. Boeing's 747X project failed and they have struggled with sales for the 747-8, but they avoided heavy losses by re-using old IP rather than launching a completely new platform. Both manufacturers were caught off-guard by the events of 2008.
- cryptonector 9y ago
  I wonder if Boeing's execs arrived at their strategy by the appeal of being contrarian to Airbus' bet. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: with the jumbo market fractured they might never be able to profit from it, so why not develop the alternative and hope for the best? No doubt they had data and information from their contacts at the airlines and could sense the brightness of the point-to-point future, but having no future in splitting the jumbo market with Airbus must have been a big factor too.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    Boeing certainly have an advantage in terms of agility. Airbus is a messy conglomerate, formed from the merger of aerospace companies from France, Germany, Spain, the US and the UK. With so many corporate and governmental stakeholders, their projects tend to become bloated and overly complex, and it's difficult for them to react quickly to market conditions. The A380 project suffered severe delays, in large part because the design effort was spread between teams in four countries using different processes and software.
raverbashing 9y ago
Boeing did put some money on the 747-800 it's not like they ignored that part of the market
dghughes 9y ago
Boeing plays a lot of games like getting 40% of its revenue from the US government but crying unfair when other countries get any subsidies at all. Look at the nearly 300% duty it demanded added on to the parts made by their competitor Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier.
- valuearb 9y ago
  This is a lie. Bombardiers planes don’t compete with any Boeing planes. Yet still Boeing flexed their lobbyists.
  - louithethrid 9y ago
    Lobbyism is what saved the american car industry.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Citation needed, cause no.
    - majormajor 9y ago
      The American car industry is safe in the US market as long as nobody outside the US figures out how to compete with the F150. Even if it had to eventually ditch everything but the trucks, the cash cow shows no signs of dying anytime soon. Make them aluminum, carbon fiber, electric, turbo, whatever - it's the form factor that sells.
      - selectodude 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax Foreign automakers can't sell trucks in the US.
        kalleboo 9y ago
        Sure they can, they just can't import them. Japanese car makers have had manufacturing in the US for ages now.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Emirates buying so many A380s The governments of Dubai and Abu Dhabi have invested a fortune into their international hubs. The shift away from hub-and-spoke is a demise for them, too.

zerkten 9y ago

It seems like a company can only make one successful move at a time (in what I find a very ugly) industry. At the lower end Boeing struggles with the 737 being too large for a lot of markets. There Embraer, Bombardier (now part of Airbus), and a bunch of other companies seem to have an opportunity, if they can execute. It'll be interesting to see what Boeing does there given the cozy relationship with Embraer.

rchowe 9y ago
Bombardier is not a part of Airbus now, they just sold 50.01% of the C-series program to Airbus so that they could manufacture them in Alabama and dodge the 300% tariff imposed on them by the US government. It is unclear where the C-series airplanes for non-US markets will be made, but it's suspected to still be by Bombardier in Canada.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  > It is unclear where the C-series airplanes for non-US markets will be made, but it's suspected to still be by Bombardier in Canada. It's pretty clear—Canada. That said, there's a significant change: sales, and post-sales work, will mostly be handled by Airbus, who already have much more contact with many more airlines and leasing companies than Bombardier.

pmcollins 9y ago

Boeing's market analysis said that the market could barely support one super-jumbo, let alone two, so they opted for the much cheaper 747 upgrade and we got the 747-8 (which is also headed for extinction). I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. The optimal size from an efficiency perspective is the much smaller 737 -- the more you deviate from that, the larger the efficiency penalty.

froindt 9y ago
>I heard an analyst say that you have to carry a lot of fuel to carry a lot of fuel. Yep! Aerospace has been on the leading edge of manufacturing methods for many years because of it. Even worse is having a heavy airplane at the start of the flight (the weight is always there). In school we were talking about manufacturing aerospace parts, and the joke is that you always take a nice chunk of aluminum and machine away 85% of the volume. GE has been doing lots of work with metal additive manufacturing, in some cases increasing performance while also decreasing cost. It allows geometries which are otherwise impossible with traditional manufacturing methods. Metal AM is also hella expensive. You won't see tons of metal AM parts on consumer cars anytime soon, as the metal powders and machines are expensive, and production rates are often slow in comparison to traditional manufacturing methods. For reference, my professor passed around a part which weighed around 2 pounds and fit in your hand. The all-in cost to get that printed in steel was around $5,000, and around $8,000 for titanium. https://www.ge.com/reports/epiphany-disruption-ge-additive-chief-explains-3d-printing-will-upend-manufacturing/ https://www.ge.com/reports/epiphany-disruption-ge-additive-c...
- louithethrid 9y ago
  Never understoood why they would not use the fuel as stability element- basically- the elments carrying the fuelweight, are made from a carbonsponge that holds frozzen fuel..
  - briandear 9y ago
    The complexity and logistical difficulty of what you describe is mind blowing not to mention adding non trivial safety concerns.

namdnay 9y ago

I think that for airlines that want to differentiate on comfort/quality, the A380 is a must-have: You can pimp up the interior of a 787 as much as you want, it will never be as comfortable as what you can do with an A380 (see my other comment on the Emirates A380). However this segment probably isn't big enough to justify such an expensive production line... @frik - for some reason you are "dead" - no-one can see your comments since 5 days ago. Edit: now you're not! Congratulations I guess?

code4tee 9y ago
I’ve flown just about every commercial model of airplane made in the last 30 years including Emirates A380 biz class. While that was undoubtedly an amazing trip, it had a lot more to do with the airline than the airplane. My enthusiasm for the trip also dropped off when I had to spend several hours waiting around in the middle of the night at their hub in Dubai.
- namdnay 9y ago
  Yes! See my other comment - the DXB stopover is their Achilles heel I think.
- oblio 9y ago
  Why? What happened in Dubai?
  - personlurking 9y ago
    Probably has to do with the way airlines schedule their flights, depending on the final destination and direction. Sometimes you'll catch a flight and can't make a connecting flight for several hours. How Airlines Schedule Flights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGXahSnA_oA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGXahSnA_oA
  - nhf 9y ago
    Many flights in Dubai happen late at night / very early morning due to a combination of time zone alignment and daytime heat making it harder to service large planes.

dawhizkid 9y ago

I don't think they're scrambling. The A350 is their 787 competitor and looks amazing. Can't wait to try it out.

code4tee 9y ago
Um, there’s 5 787s flying around for every A350. On the future book Boeing also has around 50% more 787 orders than Airbus has A350. So yeah, I’d call that being a bit behind in that market segment.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  It's 1250 to 850 orders.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    And it's 625 to 133 deliveries...
    - masklinn 9y ago
      And it's 2011 to 2015...
  - 24gttghh 9y ago
    850 x .5 = 425 850 + 425 = 1275 Looks pretty damn close to 50% more orders for Boeing, so I'm not sure what you are implying.
    - thisacctforreal 9y ago
      protip: 1250 / 850 = 1.4706, ie 147%
- tolien 9y ago
  The 787 first flew 4 years earlier too, cost 3x as much to develop and aren’t selling for three times the price. To the end of last month there were 858 orders (133 delivered) for the A350 versus 1287 (625 delivered) for the Dreamliner. Considering the 787 had a head start (787 introduced in 2011, A350 XWB in 2015), the pressure’s on Airbus to keep ramping up deliveries (the last few years it looks like Boeing’s stabilised at ~130 per year) but that gap’s going to shrink pretty quickly…

danmaz74 9y ago

> The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design. Isn't the A350 already a very good contender there?

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
Yes but HN always has been a pro-Boeing board. The A350 has around 850 orders vs. Boeing 1250 orders for their 787. So "scrambling" is highly subjective and suggestive.

ptero 9y ago

> The future in long haul is mid-size highly efficient twin engine jets and here Airbus is scrambling to catch up with Boeing in both sales and design I agree with your first paragraph, but not at all sure about this. Current air transportation is very stratified, but some of its numerous rules could get a major rework in the next N years (N >= 10). Current setup has mid-size sweetspot when optimized on existing rules on routes, airport slots, weather requirements and in general ATC that is over 30 years old. Even if only parts of the plans get accepted they can change optimizations significantly, e.g. if and when Nextgen allows planes fly directly from A to B (instead of along a few pre-defined segments) it might push sweetspot from mostly mid-size to a bimodal distribution: smaller for small airports, larger between main hubs. Or some other way.

code4tee 9y ago
It’s actually the airlines dragging their feet on a lot of this, not “30 year old ATC.” Many airlines don’t upgrade their planes to have the latest equipment. Flew in a small personal plane with a friend that’s a pilot and he was explaining how in several areas his small plane has more advanced avionics than commercial airliners. For example, his plane is certified to fly the latest 3D GPS based landing approaches while many commercial airliners still don’t have the necessary equipment onboard.
- ptero 9y ago
  > It’s actually the airlines dragging their feet on a lot of this, not “30 year old ATC.” Many airlines don’t upgrade their planes to have the latest equipment. Yes, and I believe they do not upgrade because it makes no business sense for them. Regulators say, for example, "install ADS-B so you are compliant with latest standards" which at the moment has no tangible benefits for the airline. If, by installing it airline would get useful additional capabilities, such as being able to fly direct from point A to point B or allow for lower separation I suspect they would upgrade quickly. The above is not (really) bashing ATC -- there is a very low tolerance for mid-air collisions, so regulatory change is very, very slow.
  - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jdietrich 9y ago

There was a shift in the aviation market that wasn't entirely straightforward to predict. Airbus bet that the market would continue with a hub-and-spoke model, with lots of regional jets providing connections to hub airports. Boeing bet that the market would shift towards point-to-point service, with direct flights between second-tier airports facilitated by mid-size jets with extended range. Boeing clearly made the right call, but there's an element of hindsight at play. Emirates, Etihad and Singapore have been very successful as pure hub-and-spoke airlines and there's still a vast amount of traffic going through the major hub airports. The lead time on new aircraft designs is immense - the A3XX project started in 1994 and took the first orders in 2000. Airbus made some strategic blunders and didn't respond quickly enough to market conditions, but in some respects they were just unlucky. Boeing's 747X project failed and they have struggled with sales for the 747-8, but they avoided heavy losses by re-using old IP rather than launching a completely new platform. Both manufacturers were caught off-guard by the events of 2008.

cryptonector 9y ago
I wonder if Boeing's execs arrived at their strategy by the appeal of being contrarian to Airbus' bet. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: with the jumbo market fractured they might never be able to profit from it, so why not develop the alternative and hope for the best? No doubt they had data and information from their contacts at the airlines and could sense the brightness of the point-to-point future, but having no future in splitting the jumbo market with Airbus must have been a big factor too.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  Boeing certainly have an advantage in terms of agility. Airbus is a messy conglomerate, formed from the merger of aerospace companies from France, Germany, Spain, the US and the UK. With so many corporate and governmental stakeholders, their projects tend to become bloated and overly complex, and it's difficult for them to react quickly to market conditions. The A380 project suffered severe delays, in large part because the design effort was spread between teams in four countries using different processes and software.

raverbashing 9y ago

Boeing did put some money on the 747-800 it's not like they ignored that part of the market

dghughes 9y ago

Boeing plays a lot of games like getting 40% of its revenue from the US government but crying unfair when other countries get any subsidies at all. Look at the nearly 300% duty it demanded added on to the parts made by their competitor Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier.

valuearb 9y ago
This is a lie. Bombardiers planes don’t compete with any Boeing planes. Yet still Boeing flexed their lobbyists.
- louithethrid 9y ago
  Lobbyism is what saved the american car industry.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Citation needed, cause no.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    The American car industry is safe in the US market as long as nobody outside the US figures out how to compete with the F150. Even if it had to eventually ditch everything but the trucks, the cash cow shows no signs of dying anytime soon. Make them aluminum, carbon fiber, electric, turbo, whatever - it's the form factor that sells.
    - selectodude 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax Foreign automakers can't sell trucks in the US.
      - kalleboo 9y ago
        Sure they can, they just can't import them. Japanese car makers have had manufacturing in the US for ages now.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> Emirates buying so many A380s The governments of Dubai and Abu Dhabi have invested a fortune into their international hubs. The shift away from hub-and-spoke is a demise for them, too.