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Comment by sseveran | Hacker News Reader

That is unlikely. The A320neo family currently has an order backlog of over 6000. The only airline I know that is actually pursuing cancellation is Garuda. Given that the A320neo family is really the only competitor to the 737MAX family airlines don't really have anywhere else to go.

I also doubt customers will really vote with their feet given that the number one factor when booking a ticket is price. If some people choose not to fly on them it will create supply/demand imbalances in the market which would be interesting.

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Why do these airplane manufacturers all have such massive order backlogs? Is it that difficult to scale production?

Yes. Take a look at the issues Boeing had with the 787 production or even just the distance which both Airbus and Boeing ship giant pieces of airplane.

Airbus currently builds about 660 A320s per year. At roughly $100 million apiece, that’s about $66 billion per year of product. How many other manufacturing companies produce that much stuff? And this sort of low volume, high value manufacturing is a bad fit for the sort of automation that allows, say, Toyota to build 10 million cars per year.

> I also doubt customers will really vote with their feet

Agreed. As the article points out:

"Passengers eventually returned to flying the 787 and to other airplanes that were grounded: the McDonnell Douglas DC-10, the Douglas DC-6, the Lockheed Constellation and even the de Havilland Comet."

I'm not sure the DC-10 is a great example. It was grounded in 1979 and discontinued in 1983 after airlines stopped ordering it. The company never recovered and died a long and slow death until Boeing scooped them up.

Neither is the Lockheed Electra (one would guess that the author means that airplane instead of the Constellation). Airlines cancelled their orders and Lockheed had to end production of the model early, leading to very substantial losses for the company.

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