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Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner

103 points by helsinkiandrew 1y ago

targadany 1y ago
Good, Airbus deserves it. Boeing management prioritised stock price by aggressively cutting costs, outsourcing critical work, and pressuring engineers into a compromising safety culture, and quality control. Dennis Muilenburg is mostly to blame them gave himself over $90 million in compensation and severance. I assume Airbus knows this behaviour is bad?
buyucu 1y ago
Not surprising, no? Boeing has killed so many people, and had so many near-misses recently that there is no way I'm flying in a Boeing plane these days.
PaulRobinson 1y ago
Complacency - particularly a sense of you being on top in the natural order of things - will kill you, one way or another. No empire has ever survived it from the Romans to, the British empire to, well, I guess Boeing. Business textbooks are rammed with stories of complacency gutting market-dominating corporates (IBM, Kodak, Xerox), and the big reckoning seems to be coming for the likes of Boeing, GM, Ford, and many more. In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there. The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start. When you're not totally absorbed by the share price, and instead you're trying to build a sustainable long-term business that can pay off decades (or generations), later, you get to make decisions that lead to a more sustainable and trusted business.
- Pavilion2095 1y ago
  > The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start. But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. If anything, they abandoned the idea of a new design and introduced 737 MAX as a response to the competition - A320neo.
  - Gravityloss 1y ago
    I guess that's also a natural evolution of many industries and societies, which has happened many times. First you have rapid iteration and lots of innovation. Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. Then it gets so bad you won't have anyone working anymore who has finished any new projects during their career, everybody's been working on the same decades long projects since time immemorial. Some new ones are started, some are cancelled every now and then but none are finished. Then the organization will not even try anymore and accept to live in the ruins created by past generations. Then it could happen that all artifacts crumble, all documentation disappears and even the people propagating the intergenerational verbal history forget or die and nobody will even know that anything existed.
    - Frieren 1y ago
      > Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. The problem with Boeing is mostly a business side one, not an engineering problem. Boeing invested in buy backs instead of creating good products, and that has been its philosophy for a while. Interesting read: https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... "Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” "Everything seemed to be changing—the leadership, the culture, even the headquarters, with a move from Seattle to Chicago in 2001." "Many employees struggled to adjust, or resented what they saw as a changing of the guard, where investors took priority over passengers."
      - Gravityloss 1y ago
        Yes, I agree. But the whole business area has also changed and matured. B737 is 56 years old, but A320 is 38 years so not very new anymore. Certification takes very long nowadays, for any company. So the financialization might not have happened in a vacuum or because of some villain, but motivated by the situation that there was less money to be made with engineering anymore.
- themafia 1y ago
  Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.
  - pjjpo 1y ago
    Looking at their general stock performance, I'd say it's actually only the customers being killed. Agree with the sentiments of the sibling posts that monopolies seem as great for business as ever.
  - PedroBatista 1y ago
    Boeing is going nowhere. One of the reasons Boeing’s bad behavior in last couple decades is also the reason they won’t die: The US Government
    - themafia 1y ago
      Yea. That's the other new phenomenon this new century has brought us, zombie corporations kept alive by feeding them good tax dollars after bad investments. We have to learn to bury our dead properly.
  - tempodox 1y ago
    > Monopolies will kill you. But sadly not fast enough. The monopolies get to make everyone else miserable for far too long.
  - g9yuayon 1y ago
    And the competition from Airbus may not make Boeing better either. On the contrary, Boeing may well get into a death spiral and a slow but painful death. What competition really means is that incumbents can die without impacting customers as other more competent alternatives will fill the void.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >Monopolies will kill you. So when is it gonna kill Google?
- MaKey 1y ago
  Another recent example is Intel.
  - scrlk 1y ago
    Ironic, given that Andy Grove's motto was "Only the paranoid survive". There's a Chinese saying: "Wealth does not pass three generations". Three generations of Intel CEOs after Grove: Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini and Brian Krzanich (the progenitor of much of the mess that Intel is in today).
    - targadany 1y ago
      That's why I invested in Rapidus instead of Intel (nVidia has already peaked) it's making Japanese 1nm chips by end of decade, backed by Sony, Toyota, NEC and government. Unfortunately Intel is slow, and US government is unreliable now.
- dude250711 1y ago
  > In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there. Surely, Google here is the cautionary tale? Though I guess it started with the cloud for them.
duke_sam 1y ago
It’s impressive that Airbus caught up with Boeing after a 20 year head start. It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid off but the article reads more like a PR piece than a case for why the A320 out competed the 737.
- jhoechtl 1y ago
  > It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid of Well they did bet on the Dreamliner, fell on their nose and still recovered.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Dreamliner is the Boeing 787. Are you thinking of the A380 superjumbo?
    - jhoechtl 1y ago
      Uh yeah, my mistake
- Someone 1y ago
  Boeing had a 20 year head start, but in a rapidly growing market that doesn’t count as much as in a stable one. FTA: “By 1988, when Airbus launched its new A320 narrowbody jet, Boeing had already established a strong lead, having delivered around 1,500 of its popular jets” So, Boeing sold about 1,500 767s in the first 20 years and over 10,500 in the < 40 years since. Airbus sold about 12,000 in the < 40 years since. So, to catch up, Airbus produced about 15% more than Boeing did.
- Tuna-Fish 1y ago
  A320 and the 737 were designed in entirely different worlds. The 737 was designed using light tables and slide rules, to use low-bypass turbofans and direct controls with avionics only on board to optionally aid the pilots. The A320 was designed in CAD and using CFD, with full digital fly-by-wire, and designed from the start for high-bypass turbofans. Both designs have been updated plenty since, but because the basic design is much more modern, the A320 is much more amenable to being updated. There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737. The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.
mojuba 1y ago
Makes it even more impressive considering that the A320 is slightly more expensive.
- jraby3 1y ago
  Pricing on these planes is pretty complex. It's a stretch to say that airbus is unequivocally more expensive without comparing various options. Source: my brother worked for Boeing in sales and has been in the industry 30 years.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Indeed, but the practical result in this case is that the A320 is _much_ more expensive, because demand is far higher. Ryanair's big purchase of 737 MAX-10s a while back was at, at most, 50% of list price; that degree of discount isn't really happening for the A32x at the moment, I don't think.
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    Yeah, also nobody pays list price.
jaggs 1y ago
In my country we have a saying - "Every dog has its day".
pxndxx 1y ago
Vueling, the largest airline in Spain is actually shifting from the 320 to an all Boeing 737 MAX fleet in the coming years. I was really sad to hear that given it's size and presence in Europe.
- rob74 1y ago
  Eurowings (Lufthansa's low cost carrier) has also ordered 40 737 MAX (or rather has been "allocated" a probably pre-existing order): https://newscloud.eurowings.com/en/eurowings-sets-sights-on-the-largest-fleet-modernization-in-its-history/# https://newscloud.eurowings.com/en/eurowings-sets-sights-on-... Notwithstanding the marketing BS, I wonder what the real reason behind this decision is - probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog, a "sweet" deal with Boeing, cozying up to Trump, and some other considerations that I can't think of right now? EDIT: after researching a bit more, it looks like the initial order was from 2023 (https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-40-boeing-737-max-40-airbus-a220-order/ https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-40-boeing-737-max-40-airb...), so "cozying up to Trump" was probably not a factor at the time. Also, I imagine that order being passed around like the proverbial hot potato between all the airlines in Lufthansa group, until it finally landed in Eurowings' lap: "Interested in some brand new state of the art 737 MAXes? No? Why? What do you mean, `You take them if you're so fond of them`? We would, gladly, but we have an all-A320 fleet and would like to keep it that way. Oh, you too, really?".
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    > probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog It's likely this. Airbus has a backlog of ~7500 A32x orders right now, and produces about 75 a month, so if you order one today, you're looking at eight years. Though also some budget airlines like the 737 because it's _short_; it's not as high off the ground as an A320, making access via airstairs more feasible.
- egeres 1y ago
  This decision was actually made at IAG (International Airlines Group) which is the parent company of Vueling, British Airways, Iberia etc... not Vueling per se. The main motivation behind it is the price drop on the 737 MAX line. I'm surprised that switching to Boeing it's even worth it considering given these companies mostly fly Airbus planes so their pilots, supply chains for maintenance etc will need an overhaul
Gareth321 1y ago
It has been kind of shocking to see Boeing's decline in real time like this. My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority. Reading articles from current and former employees, it sounds like the decline actually began decades ago. It took this long to raid the coffers, so to speak, of talent, good will, and QA redundancy. It is suggested that they are too big to fail, but it will be expensive to re-pad all that redundancy, and I'm not sure subsequent leaders will be willing to lose the next decade of profit in pursuit of regaining their engineering credentials. I think the true cost of this has not yet been realised in their stock price.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority. I mean realistically in this particular category (narrow-bodies) they've essentially been playing catchup for the last _40 years_; ever since it was released they've really had trouble competing with the A320. Their inability to do basically anything right feels newer, but the 737 has long been a weak spot.
  - SR2Z 1y ago
    The main problem with the 737 is really just that it's old, and at every single turn Boeing has chosen to make incremental updates instead of redesigning it. An issue like MCAS would be much less likely if the aircraft was designed to be fully fly-by-wire - but a fully fly-by-wire single-aisle would have to be recertified from scratch. The problem with jetliner manufacturing is that you kind of have to bet the company on every single new model you release, just because the process of designing a new plane is so cumbersome and difficult that you can't really afford to be doing it very often.
h4kunamata 1y ago
Poised?? Only if a company is completely blind to buy Boeing planes in 2025! It does not matter if the places are millions of dollars cheaper, all the money spent with lawsuits and lawyers when things go sideways, plus the airline name dragged to shit, I don't think it is worth.
- closewith 1y ago
  The airline with the best safety record in the world, Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet (with the exception of the Lauda Airbus A320-200s) that has never had a fatal accident, despite over a 120 Boeing 737 MAX-8s currently operating.
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    It’s probably easy to find a subset of airlines that would work for either airline. But that RyanAir didn’t happen to have a version of the design that was extremely unsafe doesn’t mean that the family of planes is safer than the competition. It just means that it got lucky that it didn’t have the flawed planes.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - dahcryn 1y ago
      it's by design, Ryanair never buys from the factory AFAIK. They buy secondhand, they are basically scalpers of the second hand market, always on the lookout for a good deal. That mitigates the risk of buying untested tech with first-iteration demons
      - closewith 1y ago
        That's the complete opposite of reality. Ryanair only buy new from Boeing (often being the largest customer - the MAX 8 200 being designed specifically for their needs) and have the youngest fleet of any major.

Good, Airbus deserves it. Boeing management prioritised stock price by aggressively cutting costs, outsourcing critical work, and pressuring engineers into a compromising safety culture, and quality control. Dennis Muilenburg is mostly to blame them gave himself over $90 million in compensation and severance. I assume Airbus knows this behaviour is bad?

buyucu 1y ago

Not surprising, no? Boeing has killed so many people, and had so many near-misses recently that there is no way I'm flying in a Boeing plane these days.

PaulRobinson 1y ago

Complacency - particularly a sense of you being on top in the natural order of things - will kill you, one way or another. No empire has ever survived it from the Romans to, the British empire to, well, I guess Boeing. Business textbooks are rammed with stories of complacency gutting market-dominating corporates (IBM, Kodak, Xerox), and the big reckoning seems to be coming for the likes of Boeing, GM, Ford, and many more. In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there. The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start. When you're not totally absorbed by the share price, and instead you're trying to build a sustainable long-term business that can pay off decades (or generations), later, you get to make decisions that lead to a more sustainable and trusted business.

Pavilion2095 1y ago
> The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start. But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. If anything, they abandoned the idea of a new design and introduced 737 MAX as a response to the competition - A320neo.
- Gravityloss 1y ago
  I guess that's also a natural evolution of many industries and societies, which has happened many times. First you have rapid iteration and lots of innovation. Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. Then it gets so bad you won't have anyone working anymore who has finished any new projects during their career, everybody's been working on the same decades long projects since time immemorial. Some new ones are started, some are cancelled every now and then but none are finished. Then the organization will not even try anymore and accept to live in the ruins created by past generations. Then it could happen that all artifacts crumble, all documentation disappears and even the people propagating the intergenerational verbal history forget or die and nobody will even know that anything existed.
  - Frieren 1y ago
    > Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. The problem with Boeing is mostly a business side one, not an engineering problem. Boeing invested in buy backs instead of creating good products, and that has been its philosophy for a while. Interesting read: https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... "Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” "Everything seemed to be changing—the leadership, the culture, even the headquarters, with a move from Seattle to Chicago in 2001." "Many employees struggled to adjust, or resented what they saw as a changing of the guard, where investors took priority over passengers."
    - Gravityloss 1y ago
      Yes, I agree. But the whole business area has also changed and matured. B737 is 56 years old, but A320 is 38 years so not very new anymore. Certification takes very long nowadays, for any company. So the financialization might not have happened in a vacuum or because of some villain, but motivated by the situation that there was less money to be made with engineering anymore.
themafia 1y ago
Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.
- pjjpo 1y ago
  Looking at their general stock performance, I'd say it's actually only the customers being killed. Agree with the sentiments of the sibling posts that monopolies seem as great for business as ever.
- PedroBatista 1y ago
  Boeing is going nowhere. One of the reasons Boeing’s bad behavior in last couple decades is also the reason they won’t die: The US Government
  - themafia 1y ago
    Yea. That's the other new phenomenon this new century has brought us, zombie corporations kept alive by feeding them good tax dollars after bad investments. We have to learn to bury our dead properly.
- tempodox 1y ago
  > Monopolies will kill you. But sadly not fast enough. The monopolies get to make everyone else miserable for far too long.
- g9yuayon 1y ago
  And the competition from Airbus may not make Boeing better either. On the contrary, Boeing may well get into a death spiral and a slow but painful death. What competition really means is that incumbents can die without impacting customers as other more competent alternatives will fill the void.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >Monopolies will kill you. So when is it gonna kill Google?
MaKey 1y ago
Another recent example is Intel.
- scrlk 1y ago
  Ironic, given that Andy Grove's motto was "Only the paranoid survive". There's a Chinese saying: "Wealth does not pass three generations". Three generations of Intel CEOs after Grove: Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini and Brian Krzanich (the progenitor of much of the mess that Intel is in today).
  - targadany 1y ago
    That's why I invested in Rapidus instead of Intel (nVidia has already peaked) it's making Japanese 1nm chips by end of decade, backed by Sony, Toyota, NEC and government. Unfortunately Intel is slow, and US government is unreliable now.
dude250711 1y ago
> In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there. Surely, Google here is the cautionary tale? Though I guess it started with the cloud for them.

duke_sam 1y ago

It’s impressive that Airbus caught up with Boeing after a 20 year head start. It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid off but the article reads more like a PR piece than a case for why the A320 out competed the 737.

jhoechtl 1y ago
> It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid of Well they did bet on the Dreamliner, fell on their nose and still recovered.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Dreamliner is the Boeing 787. Are you thinking of the A380 superjumbo?
  - jhoechtl 1y ago
    Uh yeah, my mistake
Someone 1y ago
Boeing had a 20 year head start, but in a rapidly growing market that doesn’t count as much as in a stable one. FTA: “By 1988, when Airbus launched its new A320 narrowbody jet, Boeing had already established a strong lead, having delivered around 1,500 of its popular jets” So, Boeing sold about 1,500 767s in the first 20 years and over 10,500 in the < 40 years since. Airbus sold about 12,000 in the < 40 years since. So, to catch up, Airbus produced about 15% more than Boeing did.
Tuna-Fish 1y ago
A320 and the 737 were designed in entirely different worlds. The 737 was designed using light tables and slide rules, to use low-bypass turbofans and direct controls with avionics only on board to optionally aid the pilots. The A320 was designed in CAD and using CFD, with full digital fly-by-wire, and designed from the start for high-bypass turbofans. Both designs have been updated plenty since, but because the basic design is much more modern, the A320 is much more amenable to being updated. There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737. The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.

mojuba 1y ago

Makes it even more impressive considering that the A320 is slightly more expensive.

jraby3 1y ago
Pricing on these planes is pretty complex. It's a stretch to say that airbus is unequivocally more expensive without comparing various options. Source: my brother worked for Boeing in sales and has been in the industry 30 years.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Indeed, but the practical result in this case is that the A320 is _much_ more expensive, because demand is far higher. Ryanair's big purchase of 737 MAX-10s a while back was at, at most, 50% of list price; that degree of discount isn't really happening for the A32x at the moment, I don't think.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  Yeah, also nobody pays list price.

jaggs 1y ago

In my country we have a saying - "Every dog has its day".

pxndxx 1y ago

Vueling, the largest airline in Spain is actually shifting from the 320 to an all Boeing 737 MAX fleet in the coming years. I was really sad to hear that given it's size and presence in Europe.

rob74 1y ago
Eurowings (Lufthansa's low cost carrier) has also ordered 40 737 MAX (or rather has been "allocated" a probably pre-existing order): https://newscloud.eurowings.com/en/eurowings-sets-sights-on-the-largest-fleet-modernization-in-its-history/# https://newscloud.eurowings.com/en/eurowings-sets-sights-on-... Notwithstanding the marketing BS, I wonder what the real reason behind this decision is - probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog, a "sweet" deal with Boeing, cozying up to Trump, and some other considerations that I can't think of right now? EDIT: after researching a bit more, it looks like the initial order was from 2023 (https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-40-boeing-737-max-40-airbus-a220-order/ https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-40-boeing-737-max-40-airb...), so "cozying up to Trump" was probably not a factor at the time. Also, I imagine that order being passed around like the proverbial hot potato between all the airlines in Lufthansa group, until it finally landed in Eurowings' lap: "Interested in some brand new state of the art 737 MAXes? No? Why? What do you mean, `You take them if you're so fond of them`? We would, gladly, but we have an all-A320 fleet and would like to keep it that way. Oh, you too, really?".
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog It's likely this. Airbus has a backlog of ~7500 A32x orders right now, and produces about 75 a month, so if you order one today, you're looking at eight years. Though also some budget airlines like the 737 because it's _short_; it's not as high off the ground as an A320, making access via airstairs more feasible.
egeres 1y ago
This decision was actually made at IAG (International Airlines Group) which is the parent company of Vueling, British Airways, Iberia etc... not Vueling per se. The main motivation behind it is the price drop on the 737 MAX line. I'm surprised that switching to Boeing it's even worth it considering given these companies mostly fly Airbus planes so their pilots, supply chains for maintenance etc will need an overhaul

Gareth321 1y ago

It has been kind of shocking to see Boeing's decline in real time like this. My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority. Reading articles from current and former employees, it sounds like the decline actually began decades ago. It took this long to raid the coffers, so to speak, of talent, good will, and QA redundancy. It is suggested that they are too big to fail, but it will be expensive to re-pad all that redundancy, and I'm not sure subsequent leaders will be willing to lose the next decade of profit in pursuit of regaining their engineering credentials. I think the true cost of this has not yet been realised in their stock price.

rsynnott 1y ago
> My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority. I mean realistically in this particular category (narrow-bodies) they've essentially been playing catchup for the last _40 years_; ever since it was released they've really had trouble competing with the A320. Their inability to do basically anything right feels newer, but the 737 has long been a weak spot.
- SR2Z 1y ago
  The main problem with the 737 is really just that it's old, and at every single turn Boeing has chosen to make incremental updates instead of redesigning it. An issue like MCAS would be much less likely if the aircraft was designed to be fully fly-by-wire - but a fully fly-by-wire single-aisle would have to be recertified from scratch. The problem with jetliner manufacturing is that you kind of have to bet the company on every single new model you release, just because the process of designing a new plane is so cumbersome and difficult that you can't really afford to be doing it very often.

h4kunamata 1y ago

Poised?? Only if a company is completely blind to buy Boeing planes in 2025! It does not matter if the places are millions of dollars cheaper, all the money spent with lawsuits and lawyers when things go sideways, plus the airline name dragged to shit, I don't think it is worth.

closewith 1y ago
The airline with the best safety record in the world, Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet (with the exception of the Lauda Airbus A320-200s) that has never had a fatal accident, despite over a 120 Boeing 737 MAX-8s currently operating.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  It’s probably easy to find a subset of airlines that would work for either airline. But that RyanAir didn’t happen to have a version of the design that was extremely unsafe doesn’t mean that the family of planes is safer than the competition. It just means that it got lucky that it didn’t have the flawed planes.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - dahcryn 1y ago
    it's by design, Ryanair never buys from the factory AFAIK. They buy secondhand, they are basically scalpers of the second hand market, always on the lookout for a good deal. That mitigates the risk of buying untested tech with first-iteration demons
    - closewith 1y ago
      That's the complete opposite of reality. Ryanair only buy new from Boeing (often being the largest customer - the MAX 8 200 being designed specifically for their needs) and have the youngest fleet of any major.