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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> Civil aviation is beer money to Boeing. They make the brunt of the money in military. That’s also where the margins are

You haven't been keeping track I presume. Boeing is bleeding money on recent military contracts like the Air Force One Replacement or the KC-46, because they're on a fixed price structure and Boeing drastically underestimated the costs involved.

So much so that for the replacement of the NEACP ("Doomsday Planes") Boeing withdrew from bidding because they refuse to get into another fixed price military programme, knowing they can't predict costs for shit and will lose a lot of money. They're only interested in costs+ contracts, which nobody seems to be willing to give them.

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That contract was first awarded to Airbus' A330-MRTT tanker aircraft (which is currently in service with other air forces). Boeing was so upset by losing a Pentagon contract that they lobbied the US government hard into voiding the original contract award and re-opening the tender. Subsequently, Boeing placed an unreasonably low bid and Airbus walked away saying they can't make it happen at that price.

So, this was an entirely predictable own goal by Boeing.

Not to mention the embarrassment that is the Starliner program. Now SpaceX has almost finished the 6 launches the original contract included and is moving into a second contract. Boeing has yet to do its first launch "active" launch.

Boeing had tried to get the snakes in Congress to cancel SpaceX's contract at the start because Boeing was clearly the reliable option, we see how that's turned out.

I wonder why lol. Although I will say that some of the issues that Lockheed Martin has had with the JSF and Littoral Combat Ships is that the military is asking them to build something far too complex. The whole module thing never worked out and that seems obvious. I think instead they should have tried for a couple of specific designs that served specific roles instead of building a single ship or plane that could do lots of things poorly while bleeding too much money.

Disclaimer: I'm just guessing at all of this. I'm no expert. Not even an armchair.

That's a "fighter mafia" opinion that's not really grounded in reality (the language of "specific designs for specific roles" is from them).

The JSF on a per unit basis is now cheaper then some 4th gen non-stealth fighters, and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality.

>and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality.

That remains to be seen. Ukraine has completely upended military doctrine of the last 30 years. Dog fights are happening regularly, and air defense has proven to be far more effective than we could have imagined. The F-35 has never been proven in combat, and it's an open question as to whether its' known weaknesses will matter in a high intensity near-peer conflict.

So let's ship some to Ukraine and get them battle tested!

They're too expensive to hand out I would guess (also Russia might start threatening nuclear war again) and it would be a disaster to have one get blown up easily.

They're probably also still not fully combat ready.

Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They might have been a few in the first ~month, but not at all since then. Air defense being more effective is even more support for stealth, which directly reduces air defense's effectiveness.

>Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine.

They are happening far more regularly than US Air Force doctrine calls for, which is never. Posessing total air superiority is baked into nearly every decision.

"Specific designs for specific roles" is a general engineering thing. Any engineer knows that it's easier to get good performance (in whatever dimension you're measuring performance) if you're designing for only one use case than if you're trying to be everything to everyone. Designs that try to do everything end up being overconstrained and then having to make (often irrational from the POV of any one user) compromises to fit reality.

Software monopolies face this on a daily basis. Much of what we see as "enshittification" from a consumer standpoint comes from single products that need to serve the needs of 3B consumers. The idea of "unbundling" that was en vogue in startup circles from ~2013-2016 is just that startups which serve one use case for one customer base are able to eek out efficiencies that consumer tech giants cannot.

I'm not in aerospace or military so I can't comment on whether the JSF itself performs poorly. How would that even be defined, though? It doesn't have a whole lot of competition to measure against. (Seems like a common thread in these discussions...)

Yeah that was basically my thought that perhaps they need a dogfighter, a long range bomber, some kind of thing like an A-10 or C-130 gunship.

Not sure if Ukraine is showing us that some of those are now useless or not.

It must be difficult to design something like the JSF that has to have a vertical takeoff version and all this other junk to make 4 branches of the military happy. Part of me thinks that having two different planes would have made more sense and lifted a lot of design constraints.

I wonder what went wrong woth the combat module concept. The Dutch who inspired this in the LCS are using similar modules just fine apparently on their ships.

One of the issues was wiring harnesses being too close together. The USAF has higher requirements in for redundancy and fault-tolerance in aircraft that may be shot at than civilian airliners do, go figure. Either way, it's not something that should be new for a company like Boeing that's done several generations of airliner to tanker conversions.

The LCS's mission modules were based on the Danish Stanflex system, which seems to be working pretty well. Since the modular mission packages have gone away, the remaining ones are going to be installed more permanently, making the LCS into more of a purpose built ship. This won't really help the LCS though because it was already purpose built to operate in the littorals, which was a role that never really made sense

They were probably used to having unlimited funding in the past and now that military purchasers finally woke up and decided to limit spending on projects with fixed cost caps. Boeing doesn't know how to bud with the actual cost. Can't nid low and then go ask for addtional budgets.

When I read up recently on the KC-46 bidding, I found a quote from an Airbus exec at the time saying Airbus won't bid in the second round, because Boeing's offer was too aggressive. I guess being burned once, with the A400M, was a lesson Airbus didn't forget.

> They're only interested in costs+ contracts, which nobody seems to be willing to give them.

"What do you mean we have to deliver planes that don't fall out of the sky? That's an outrageous requirement!"

Interesting. Also, do you think their civil and military depts are isolated ? or do blunders in one can appear in the other ? this would surely cause the US to have cold feet in asking them for more planes.

The rot at Boeing came from the McDonnell-Douglas acquisition and its military-contractor culture of corruption. Harry Stonecipher used to joke McDonnell-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's own money.

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