I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands out in my memories:
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.
And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.
Office politics, I guess, though it was kind of tinged since the offices were in different countries, but it still was Airbus-level, not nation-level, I guess.
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.
The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.
This article is pushing its narrative so hard that it feels like the author's selection process was "I want to say something about Europe, which company would support my claims".
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue.
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
There is also the idea that innovation is hard in established organisations. William Langewiesche's book "fly by wire" highlights some of the improvements that Boeing no dought knew about, but hadn't got round to. They were busy playing catch-up.
Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture. It makes sense that it would excel at an industry that requires putting safety above everything.
The article says they did a lot of customer research and even lobbying, leading to fuel efficiency focus and reduced size, and sticking the finger up to various offended European countries (not taking delegates to US, eschewing RR engines). This seems like savvy being sustained over decades. It must be cultural.
Even if you ask every person to walk the earth what they want, that won't allow you to know future demand. The market shifted largely from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point during development. Without the benefit of hindsight, it must have looked like a solid bet.
When A380 started, and even when it was delivered first, the answers to "what will be the preferred form of airline transport network organisation, in detail" was not yet fully answered.
And A380 simultaneously served as base (in many critical areas) for the quite quickly made A350 et al
A380 was also the result of "customer interviews", but after all the years needed to complete the project the customers have changed their mind, preferring direct flights over hub-and-spoke flights.
My overall feeling is "did they take off, or did Boeing stumble?", but looking at that chart of deliveries it seems Airbus started taking off almost 25 years ago. So the recent struggles of Boeing would really be just the straw that broke the camel's back. My guess is Airbus will dominate for the next few decades.
I think this is about right. About a quarter-century ago, airbus finally became a manufacturer that could go head to head with the 737 and win more often than not. Since then they’ve generally gone from strength to strength while Boeing has been primarily concerned with financial engineering.
It is quite simple, they had the more recent cleansheet single aisle airframe design with enough ground clearance for modern high bypass engine designs. This has baked in a lot of inherent efficiencies including manufacturability meanwhile Boeing leadership refused to invest in a 737 replacement needed in the 2000s.
It's going to be interesting to watch COMAC really get going. They've been struggling for 17 years now to get the C919 into service. It's still using a US engine (currently embargoed by Trump, but that may change). The Aero Engine Corporation of China has built an engine which is supposed to be flight tested "soon".
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but this concluding sentence annoyed me greatly:
> Governments are generally better at supporting companies in established markets where innovation takes place slowly and incrementally. This is likely why state-backed efforts have found it easier to be competitive against aerospace companies than Silicon Valley giants working at breakneck pace
I always finds it fascinating that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft (granted the later isn't a “silicon valley giant” proper) managed to build a narrative portraying themselves as “innovative companies” when they are the opposite of that: they are, and have been for almost two decades now or even more for Microsoft, very close to the complacent and short-term-profit-maximizer Boeing portrayed in this article.
They just happen to benefit from a much stronger network effect than Boeing, and work in a business where economies of scale are insane.
When you really think of those companies they mostly seem stagnant. They buy other companies, but for innovative company with essentially unlimited amounts of resources. Wouldn't you expect a big innovation at least say every other year?
> They also mastered the world of DC lobbying, successfully outmaneuvering Boeing and Lockheed’s attempts to use anti-trust regulations to shut the European entrant out of the US market.
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.
There was also residual suspicion of European industry among US airliners. [...]
Against this backdrop, Airbus did everything it could to deemphasize its European heritage as it toured the US.
The European tech industry on the other hand managed to curb that suspicion by becoming a complete non-threat.
I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands out in my memories:
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
How would you say their cultures compliment each other? I would be interested to hear more concrete, and especially how it ends up when you mix them.
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.
Maybe, yeah.
And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.
I just remember being shocked by the negativity.
Was that country political politics or office politics politics?
Office politics, I guess, though it was kind of tinged since the offices were in different countries, but it still was Airbus-level, not nation-level, I guess.
> I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project
Cf Arianespace.
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
> Europe is a graveyard of failed national champions … Airbus is the rare success story.
Oh, come now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.
The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.
Right, everything must about increasing the scoreboard in the bank UI.
This article is pushing its narrative so hard that it feels like the author's selection process was "I want to say something about Europe, which company would support my claims".
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
They became monopolies/state sponsored entities.
It happens everywhere under every market system.
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue.
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
What are you talking about? Which airframe scandal?
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
You've got the whole thing wrong.
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
737 Max was a compendium of failures. Airframe wasn’t one of them. If anything, the 737 series’ airframes are perfected to a fault.
Didn't the problems start when Boeing began using new engines on an old airframe for the Max?
https://www.eetimes.com/software-wont-fix-boeings-faulty-air...
Tons of problems that only are accepted due being grandfathered in.
> Tons of problems that only are accepted due being grandfathered in
What are you basing this on?
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
> a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max
Instrumentation. Not airframe.
Boeing’s failure was in trying to make a great airframe compensate for failings in other systems.
It is a lackluster airframe but with an entire workforce certified to fly it and thus it is forced to stay around.
Just look at the anti-ice issues preventing 737 Max 7 and 10 to be certified.
> Just look at the anti-ice issues preventing 737 Max 7 and 10 to be certified
Not airframe!
Ignore everything that makes the 737 a modern passenger aircraft and it’s awesome!
> Ignore everything that makes the 737 a modern passenger aircraft and it’s awesome!
You’re moving the goalposts because you didn’t understand what an airframe is.
The engine anti ice system are literally generic aerodynamic parts and control systems provided by Boeing.
You know, part of the same assembly causing MCAS to exist.
But that is of course not part of the airframe.
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
There is also the idea that innovation is hard in established organisations. William Langewiesche's book "fly by wire" highlights some of the improvements that Boeing no dought knew about, but hadn't got round to. They were busy playing catch-up.
Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture. It makes sense that it would excel at an industry that requires putting safety above everything.
The article says they did a lot of customer research and even lobbying, leading to fuel efficiency focus and reduced size, and sticking the finger up to various offended European countries (not taking delegates to US, eschewing RR engines). This seems like savvy being sustained over decades. It must be cultural.
> and reduced size
After launching, then dropping, the A380. Perhaps they didn’t do enough customer interviews there.
Even if you ask every person to walk the earth what they want, that won't allow you to know future demand. The market shifted largely from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point during development. Without the benefit of hindsight, it must have looked like a solid bet.
When A380 started, and even when it was delivered first, the answers to "what will be the preferred form of airline transport network organisation, in detail" was not yet fully answered.
And A380 simultaneously served as base (in many critical areas) for the quite quickly made A350 et al
This is explained in TFA.
A380 was also the result of "customer interviews", but after all the years needed to complete the project the customers have changed their mind, preferring direct flights over hub-and-spoke flights.
The chart of Airbus vs Boeing hull sales would have benefited from a center line Airbus above boeing below style.
Stacked charts for two families work better that way than stack from baseline.
My overall feeling is "did they take off, or did Boeing stumble?", but looking at that chart of deliveries it seems Airbus started taking off almost 25 years ago. So the recent struggles of Boeing would really be just the straw that broke the camel's back. My guess is Airbus will dominate for the next few decades.
I think this is about right. About a quarter-century ago, airbus finally became a manufacturer that could go head to head with the 737 and win more often than not. Since then they’ve generally gone from strength to strength while Boeing has been primarily concerned with financial engineering.
It is quite simple, they had the more recent cleansheet single aisle airframe design with enough ground clearance for modern high bypass engine designs. This has baked in a lot of inherent efficiencies including manufacturability meanwhile Boeing leadership refused to invest in a 737 replacement needed in the 2000s.
This seems a little disingenuous - the US taxpayer will always keep Boeing solvent, even if they were down to selling one 737 per year.
It's going to be interesting to watch COMAC really get going. They've been struggling for 17 years now to get the C919 into service. It's still using a US engine (currently embargoed by Trump, but that may change). The Aero Engine Corporation of China has built an engine which is supposed to be flight tested "soon".
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but this concluding sentence annoyed me greatly:
> Governments are generally better at supporting companies in established markets where innovation takes place slowly and incrementally. This is likely why state-backed efforts have found it easier to be competitive against aerospace companies than Silicon Valley giants working at breakneck pace
I always finds it fascinating that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft (granted the later isn't a “silicon valley giant” proper) managed to build a narrative portraying themselves as “innovative companies” when they are the opposite of that: they are, and have been for almost two decades now or even more for Microsoft, very close to the complacent and short-term-profit-maximizer Boeing portrayed in this article.
They just happen to benefit from a much stronger network effect than Boeing, and work in a business where economies of scale are insane.
When you really think of those companies they mostly seem stagnant. They buy other companies, but for innovative company with essentially unlimited amounts of resources. Wouldn't you expect a big innovation at least say every other year?
> They also mastered the world of DC lobbying, successfully outmaneuvering Boeing and Lockheed’s attempts to use anti-trust regulations to shut the European entrant out of the US market.
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.