There are extreme barriers to entry for airplane manufacturing. You can’t just get a couple million dollars from some VC and have an MVP 747 in 6 months. There’

There are extreme barriers to entry for airplane manufacturing. You can’t just get a couple million dollars from some VC and have an MVP 747 in 6 months. There’s a reason that only 2.5 (.5 being COMAC) companies in the world that produce commercial airliners. A new player has to have tens of billions of dollars in investment and also be willing to wait 10-15 years before a single plane is approved by the FAA and other regulatory bodies, and unless you have a radically different airframe (Boom, etc) your company will directly compete on price with Boeing and Airbus, who have a 100 year head start. There’s also a strong incentive to not let Boeing go under, because 1.5 airline companies is dramatically worse for [safety, cost, innovation] than having 2.5. So not only is it NOT a free market (MASSIVE long-term investment plus enormous warranted regulatory burden), but we don’t want it to be one! Because we don’t ever ever want Boeing or Airbus to fail because that would be devastating to national security and safety etc. All this is to say that “a race to the bottom” in this context is maybe more harmful than in other markets, because there really isn’t much backpressure (outside regulatory oversight) to keep standards high.