14 ms·

This is just the start of the trouble for Boeing. They are technologically quite substantially in arrears to Airbus, and with none of their products able to pul

• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > They are technologically quite substantially in arrears to Airbus I thought Boeing’s composites tech is way ahead of Airbus’s.
  • the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
    In which way?
    • nickff 6y ago
      My understanding is that Boeing has used composites for a wider variety of structures, and more complex structures than Airbus, though I am not the OP, or an expert in the field.
      • CydeWeys 6y ago
        Unfortunately they're just chasing marginal efficiency gains with these. It's much more important to make a plane that's safe enough to actually remain in the air.
        • Alupis 6y ago
          > Unfortunately they're just chasing marginal efficiency gains with these Marginal gains is the name of the game for airliners. A 2% increase in fuel efficiency is something airlines drool over. > It's much more important to make a plane that's safe enough to actually remain in the air. Which Boeing unequivocally does. Ya, they stumbled with the 737-MAX, but all the other perfectly good 737 variants are still the workhorse of most airlines. There's still more 737's flying around than Airbus A320 variants (including the A321). That doesn't even account for all the 767, 777 and 787's flying around the world every day... nor all the 747's and DC10/MD-11's shuttling freight too.
          • CydeWeys 6y ago
            > Marginal gains is the name of the game for airliners. A 2% increase in fuel efficiency is something airlines drool over. It's not if the resultant airplane isn't safe to use. 2% improvement over nothing (because you can't even fly the damn thing) is nothing. Most of the success stories you're referring to are the old Boeing, from decades past. The 787 had lots of problems but they did eventually get it dialed in with fortunately no fatal crashes, just having lost many billions of dollars in overruns. But their most recent plane is an absolute disaster. They can't keep coasting on the successes of the past without making more successes in the future. These layoffs are prove of it. On their current trajectory, they are failing.
        • nickff 6y ago
          The history of aviation is that of chasing marginal efficiency gains. Are you trying to make some nationalistic point, or just make yourself sound superior? Sometimes aircraft crash due to faults in design or user interface; examples include the DC-10 cargo doors, de Havilland Comet, and arguably Airbus' own A330 in the case of AF447. Two Boeing aircraft crashed for a series of reasons, yet Boeing still has a storied history of making very safe, effective aircraft.
          • CydeWeys 6y ago
            > The history of aviation is that of chasing marginal efficiency gains. Yes, while crucially, making your plane safe enough to fly. > Are you trying to make some nationalistic point From the HN rules: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." I'll have you know, I'm Nth generation American, never lived anywhere else. My American identity, however, is emphatically not wrapped up in this one particular company. I can be honest when it's faltering and not doing well without feeling like I'm letting down my national identity. Can you? This storied history you're referring to is the old Boeing. The new Boeing (the one taken over in a reverse merger by McDonnell Douglas business people) isn't doing so great.
      • dingaling 6y ago
        Airbus was the first company to use a large composite load-bearing structure on an airliner, the A300 vertical tail back in 1984. Most of the A380 and A350 are composite, just put together differently to the 787. Airbus also now have access to the most advanced composite lay-up technology, used by Bombardier Belfast to build the A220 wings. The real pioneer was Beech, with the all-composite Starship; it took huge balls to release that on the commercial market, and sadly the gamble didn't pay off. They went back to building aluminium King Airs.
        • redis_mlc 6y ago
          Composites have some pluses, but also serious minuses. Here's a good overview: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/composite-materials-aircraft-structure-282777 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/composite-materials-aircra... Metals have inherent temperature-resistance and repairability that composites don't have, and support transsonic and supersonic flight heating. Some early aircraft that used composites ended up heavier than aluminum, so achieved no benefit. I consider metals to be higher tech than composites for aircraft construction. Also, metal can be quickly stamped, whereas composites are generally made by vacuum forming, which is a slow process that's hard to parallelize. Most of the WW2 planes you've heard of were made of metal in runs of 10,000 to 20,000 each, impossible for composites - you might get 10% or less.
  • KingOfCoders 6y ago
    No, but it probably depends on your definition of "way ahead".
    • KingOfCoders 6y ago
      Boeing was ahead when building the dreamliner, but "The A350 XWB is the first Airbus mostly made of carbon fibre reinforced polymer." -Wikipedia
  • Gibbon1 6y ago
    Course Boeing outsourced a lot of that technology to save money. Which didn't save money and now the tech is available to their competitors.
• noir_lord 6y ago
  US Gov will bail them out (even if optically it doesn't look like a bail-out), boeing is a huge defence contractor.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Certainly, but Boeing stripped down to just its defense contracts would be a huge fall.
  • danans 6y ago
    The article is about the jobs disappearing, not Boeing disappearing. Any such bailout isn't going to be enough to bring back jobs in the commercial aircraft business, which is likely where most of these job cuts are coming from.
    • munk-a 6y ago
      The original comment was that Boeing is in trouble itself - and the parent comment was addressing that trouble and what the US response will be. I agree that those jobs are likely not coming back, but the company isn't going anywhere since the US just lost a lot of clout covering Boeing when the MAX incident happened - they're not going to give up on it now.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • dougmwne 6y ago
    Yes, but there's more than one way to save Boeing's defense business and recent scandals have left them with less political capital then they would have otherwise had. There's no guarantee post-bailout Boeing would be the same company as pre-bailout Boeing or even remain a single company.
  • alharith 6y ago
    Then they can focus on just being a defense contractor. But there's nothing that requires them to bail out the commercial airline business, and it wouldn't be the first time a major aerospace and defense company made this pivot. When Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta, they stopped making commercial airliners.
• hajola 6y ago
  > They are technologically quite substantially in arrears to Airbus Could you expand on that?
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    For starters, their highest selling plane, the 737 series, is a six decade old obsolete fly-by-mechanical-cable design that sits too low to the ground to fit large modern high efficiency jet engines. Airbus and Embraer both make substantially better planes in the same/similar segment.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      What does Embraer make that competes with the 737? The 195 has a max capacity well under the 737.
      • nickff 6y ago
        Yes, Embraer's offerings are more comparable to Bombardier's C-series (now Airbus' 220 series).
        • jacquesm 6y ago
          I fly the 220 regularly on routes within Europe and it is rapidly becoming my favorite plane for short hops (< 2500 km). It doesn't seem to be as easily perturbed as older planes, nice cabin, very quick turnarounds so rarely issues with delayed flights due to slow turnaround. This matters a lot because once you miss your departure slot on many airports in Europe it tends to get a lot worse right away, not just a few minutes.
      • CydeWeys 6y ago
        The 195 has 112 seats vs the 737 MAX 7 with 138 seats. That's pretty similar. And the Embraer is cheaper and has a nicer/more spacious/more appealing cockpit and interior. This is the 737's age showing through here; despite the 737 being larger, it's more cramped inside than the 195. Granted, most 737 MAX orders were for larger variants, and also the 737 flies farther (the Embraer is very much more of a regional jet). But there's a lot of routes that could be done using either, and the Embraer wins many of those, even before you consider the fact that the 737 MAX flat-out can't fly them at all since it's grounded indefinitely. So overall they've got superior competition from Airbus throughout the entire segment, and superior competition from Embraer at the bottom of the segment as well. Boeing is in a rough spot. They should have built a clean sheet redesign of the 737 awhile ago to handle the same segment, but they did not, and now they're really suffering for it.
• SilasX 6y ago
  Off topic, but: I had never heard that usage of "in arrears", and it sounded off because it doesn't even work metaphorically with the usage I do know, so I looked it up and ... "It's a secondary definition, sir, but it checks out." 2. (of a competitor in a sports race or match) having a lower score or weaker performance than other competitors. ‘she finished ten meters in arrears’ https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/arrears https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/arrears
  • susodapop 6y ago
    FWIW I grew up in Alabama in the 90’s and this expression was not uncommon. Often used to express late child-support payments.
    • SilasX 6y ago
      Right, but that's the usage I was familiar with: having some debt that you are behind on paying. The parent was using it to mean "performing worse than a competitor", which is distinct.
      • onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
        I guess I use words pretty liberally, but I don't see much of a distinction -- especially when you look at the etymology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/arrear https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/arrear It comes from "to the rear". So, in a competition (against Airbus), it means you're behind the person in first. On a payment schedule, it means you're behind the schedule.
        • SilasX 6y ago
          Right but it seemed like it didn't work metaphorically because a pretty important part of the definition -- something present every time I saw the term used -- is that you're in debt to someone else, usually with the connotation of them being able to take the collateralized asset. Yet there was no sense in which that relationship would apply to Boeing and Airbus. Every other time someone was behind, they were just "behind" -- never saw that prompt the use of a legalistic French term the way that "being in arrears" did. Edit: O...kay, getting some pushback on this. Let me try to explain with another analogy. Let's say I saw a comment that read, "He got involved in human trafficking because he has a mortgage." I had only ever seen "mortgage" used to referred to a secured loan for a home. So I'd interpret the statement to mean, "he has a big debt he wants to pay and needs money and that motivated him to do slimy things for it." But let's further say I had specific knowledge that that guy had paid off his home loan years ago. Then I'd be confused and say so, "uh, what? He doesn't even have a mortgage." Then a bunch of people respond to say, "oh, duh, 'mortgage' comes from the French 'death pledge'[1] -- here they were talking about how he had pledged his life to serve the cartels on pain of death." "Oh, yeah, man, I use 'mortgage' all the time to refer to a blood oath." That ... would definitely be news to me. Sure -- I wasn't aware of people who had used it the other way. But do you see why I would never have abstracted "mortgage" to refer to death pledges in general, even with great abstraction skills? Note: "Mortgage", to my knowledge, is not used in English in this other way -- I'm just conveying the sense of surprise there to learn that, had it actually been true. [1] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mortgage https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mortgage
• Aloha 6y ago
  I dont really agree with your assertion that Boeing is unable to fund future development - they have a big bucket of cash, they appear to have no trouble borrowing, and they have profitable military programs. They should be able to fund a new narrow body jet with ease. Heck, a modernized 757 would be fairly cheap to design/build and its effectively still a pretty modern airframe too.
  • ProAm 6y ago
    Defense contractors never go out of business, the US government will save this company.
    • blaser-waffle 6y ago
      They'll save the company, but that doesn't mean 12k workers are coming back. And they're mostly concerned with the Defense/Military aspects -- are they going to fund the commercial side too? (counterpoint -- the USG threw money at auto-makers)
      • Robotbeat 6y ago
        Yeah, because Boeing is probably the biggest domestic exporter. Boeing commercial will be protected.
      • colechristensen 6y ago
        While it doesn't say, these are likely very significantly manufacturing jobs, of course they'll come back. Orders are gone, cancelled, 737-MAX is stalled until the regulatory bits are done sorting out later this year, maintenance needs are way down, so you end up with empty or much slowed factories. Boeing lays off a quarter of its workforce once or twice a decade. Airplanes are big, long term investments (big airliners tend to live to the ripe old age of 30 or so) and the demand and sale of them comes and goes with the global economy. The economy slows periodically, orders dry up, and factory workers don't have any work for a long time (or more like the years long order queue gets quite a bit shorter with old orders cancelled and few new orders coming in). It's a cyclical business that can't help but to make significant adjustments to its workforce. A brief, incomplete and possibly inaccurate history of Boeing layoffs: * 31,000 September 2001 * 28,000 December 1998 * 28,000 1992 * 2,160 2012
• redisman 6y ago
  Won’t Airbus be hit very hard by covid for the next 5 years too? Airlines are probably not too eager to order new planes for a long time
  • hadrien01 6y ago
    If the market shrinks, they'll be hit just like Boeing, but there's also the current lockdown hit where Airbus has an advantage and can wait a bit more before announcing layoffs: > For now, Airbus is relying on government-backed furlough schemes in France, Germany and Britain to reduce staff costs after earlier asking employees to take 10 days’ leave.
    • redisman 6y ago
      Sure but that doesn't sound like a great medium->long-term plan. I guess Boeing will get a similar bailout.
      • brummm 6y ago
        I don't think the US has anything like furlough in Europe. Also, Boeing just fired their employees. Nothing to be done about that now.
      • fragmede 6y ago
        I bet that Boeing will eventually get a bailout that is similarly huge in terms of dollars or euros. But I'll also bet it will be structured significantly different, with far fewer worker protections. That'll end up being better by the numbers, but there are a lot of intangibles that aren't reflected in the number on the bottom line.
    • benhurmarcel 6y ago
      Airbus is also currently using partial unemployment (furlough) in most of its sites.
• yread 6y ago
  What? In the widebody market they are soundly winning. Airbus only has a warmed over a330neo to compete with 787
  • gmac 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB?
  • ryguytilidie 6y ago
    Completely disagree. You forgot the A350, which appears to be a better plane than the 777x. I also disagree that the A330 neo is inferior to the 787. Its cheaper, more reliable and the fuel burn isn't much different. To say they're "soundly" winning in the widebody market isn't correct, and it also leaves out the fact that the A220/A3XX is outselling the 737 like crazy.
    • yread 6y ago
      OP was talking about technology though: A330 neo is hardly technologically superior to 787. Even A350 doesn't have some of the innovations of 787 like not using bleed air
• 101404 6y ago
  And they were not considered by NASA for the moon lander project. And they lost the race against SpaceX for crew transport to the ISS (with no ETA for certification for their crew transporter).
• coliveira 6y ago
  Boeing will not go out of business because the government will not let it happen. All the aerospace industry starting from Boeing and ending with SpaceX is built on the pockets of tax payers. But, of course, the profits are private.
  • linuxftw 6y ago
    Boeing will go out of business, it's inevitable at this point. They've outsourced too much of their core engineering competencies, core manufacturing operations, and are mostly a financial re-packager of other people's products. They can't innovate, they don't know how, they can only cut costs. The workers they're laying off, that's the remainder of your operational knowledge walking out the door. They didn't train a new crop of engineers to replace the aging ones. I think we'll see Lockheed or Northrup acquire whatever components the DoD needs, and the commercial aviation division will be acquired by another conglomerate.
  • DC-3 6y ago
    Yeah, the saving grace for them is definitely their incestuous relationship with the US Government. But while that can save them from total collapse, it can't prop up their civil aviation activities on its own.
    • bobthepanda 6y ago
      The world may not have a choice but to do so; midsize and large planes were already a duopoly, and both had backlogged orders in the thousands. Airbus can't absorb all these new orders, and there are no other options (not for lack of trying; Japan, Russia and China among others are all having difficulties with their state-backed aircraft development programs; the planes are late, overbudget, and generally poorer quality (e.g. shorter range, less efficient)). Not to mention the huge fleet of perfectly fine Boeing aircraft already operating that still need servicing and maintenance.
    • zozin 6y ago
      As if Boeing doesn't have an incestuous relationship with European governments.
• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > The double-punch combo of the 737 MAX scandal and the pandemic will have left them in serious strife. They're probably just redundant. The 737 MAX debacle meant they weren't going to sell those planes this year, but the coronavirus meant they weren't going to sell those planes this year. Same result from one as both.
  • willhslade 6y ago
    That's... not what canceled out means.
  • bobthepanda 6y ago
    The 737 MAX was one line of aircraft. COVID is killing demand for all the other ones (777s, 787s, etc.)
    • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      That doesn't mean they're not redundant, only that the bigger problem is bigger. And Airbus has to deal with the same thing now, whereas before Boeing had a unique disadvantage.
      • bobthepanda 6y ago
        I don't think I've heard anyone use the word redundant to describe anything that was more complicated than an exact 1-1 replacement. The two-punch combo is a good analogy; I wouldn't call a punch that knocked someone out cold redundant if it came after a punch that simply gave them a nosebleed.
        • manquer 6y ago
          probably OP means to say given that you got the knockout punch the first punch is redundant not the other way around. Since no aircraft is selling now, 737-MAX issues are no longer relevant is his premise
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
• foolfoolz 6y ago
  this is not true about boeing being behind airbus. boeing saw the point to point rise and decrease of hub and spoke years earlier and invested in the 787. while airbus has poured billions into the a380, now slated for permanent production shutdown, which may have never been profitable for the company
  • benhurmarcel 6y ago
    This is history. Airbus now has the A350 which competes well against the larger 787 and smaller 777X.
• riffraff 6y ago
  Wasn't the dreamliner a great success compared to Airbus's bet on the A380? (I.e. longer point-to-point routes won over giant planes with stops). Boeing messed up the 737-MAX but I don't remember Airbus as a huge source of innovation recently. But I'm no aviation buff, I'd be happy to learn more.
  • useerup 6y ago
    The A-320 was a runaway success which threatened to shut Boeing out of that segment. Boeing needed to do something, and fast. Hence the 737-MAX as a stop-gap until they could come up with a better competitor. Yes, the A-380 (different segment) did poorly. Boeing actually had a nice thing going for them with the 787.
    • Hunisgung 6y ago
      > Boeing actually had a nice thing going for them with the 787. Recently, maybe. But the 787 program had its fair share of major issues with the significant delays during development and then the battery fires that led to the fleet being grounded.