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Not really. Aerospace is a very tight-knit oligarchy where the devil you know is entirely too often (historically shown to be) leagues better than the devil you
by fixermark 8y ago
Not really. Aerospace is a very tight-knit oligarchy where the devil you know is entirely too often (historically shown to be) leagues better than the devil you don't. A company ceasing to be a Boeing customer over an issue like this runs the risk that the next company they work with is just as bad in different ways, but now they're ways the company's ground technicians are wholly unfamiliar with.
- benj111 8y agoIt may be an oligopoly, but it is in the airlines interests to keep them on their toes. If you're an airline of any size it would make sense to have relationships with multiple manufacturers, for the reasons you describe. They can decrease their Boeing orders and increase competitors orders, to maintain relationships and punish Boeing. If you single source your your fleet, you increase the odds of something like this grounding your entire fleet, and you don't even have any leverage to negotiate better terms from Boeing.
- fixermark 8y agoI agree with your reasoning and I'm surprised that companies like Southwest seem to aim for monoculture. ... unless the risk and cost model they're looking at is that having multiple planes in the fleet increases the risk that spare parts are depleted for a particular model, ground crews aren't sufficiently cross-trained and errors on their part make flights less safe on average than in a monoculture, etc.
- notahacker 8y agoIt's less an operational risk calculation and more an operational cost calculation. It's entirely possible (and for airlines operating a wide variety of different length routes, entirely necessary) to safely operate a wide variety of airframes, but it does entail paying for a lot more redundancy.