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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when you remove all accountability from the market.

Boeing used to be accountable to its competitors; now it's the last remaining American manufacturer of airliners. The c-suite often has little accountability to the board. The government treats them with kid gloves because of item #1; who else would the USAF order tankers, AWACS and other logistical aircraft from?

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> The government treats them with kid gloves because of item #1; who else would the USAF order tankers, AWACS and other logistical aircraft from?

The military tried to order tankers from a different manufacturer, but Boeing owned enough senators to put the kibosh on that and make them re-run the competition.

Is this in reference to the Lockheed Martin/Airbus tender?

Northrop Grumman/Airbus.

I feel like any tender that doesn't feature an aircraft designed and made by an American company (preferably in the US) is going to fail on that quality alone.

Generally speaking, if you can, you should source items vital to your national defense/foreign policy from domestic sources. The problem emerges when there's only one domestic source and it exists for the sole purpose of delivering value to shareholders by any means necessary, with no real accountability.

I assume that airbus and Northrop Grumman teamed for those reasons. Airbus also has a major presence in Alabama if I'm not mistaken. BAE is based in London but has a lot of US defense contracts as well.

The ship of shareholder value has sailed a long time ago and won't be coming back any time soon.

Airbus has factories in the US and employs a lot of Americans.

Having factories and employing Americans != being American.

Everything the US military uses is manufactured in the United States, but many things are designed by foreign firms.

Not just senators, they also had a mole in the tender process passing secrets and making decisions that Boeing then "hired" on an inflated salary. They were later convicted for fraud for their part and Boeing was fined but they still got to keep the contract.

The actual problem is production. Airlines don't want to buy the MAX. The issue is is, if you want to order 100 A320s or 100 A220, you are gone wait a long, long time.

So you have two options, no planes, or the 737 MAX. Those are their options.

Boeing 737 Max backlog [1] is almost as big as Airbus’s [2]. If you are going to order a hundred planes you’re going to be waiting a long time regardless. Orders have been outpacing deliveries for years.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_order...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_famil...

If you already have a position in the the queue for 737 then giving that up to switch would be a huge issue.

Since the MAX initial problems the A320/A220 have been growing far more orders is pulling ahead of the 737 by quite a bit.

I've heard that the problem is that airplanes are roughly commodotized, as in they can't compete on features, only price.

And to compete on price, supply chains become more specialized and more fragile and efficient, or software is added to reduce pilot training fees.

I thought the whole reason for the MAX was that Airbus released a plane that featured better engines and performance.

Better engines and lighter materials were about fuel, a serious operating costs that goes into calculating the profit of a route when presuming maximally cheap consumers, AFA I understood.

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