Hacker News Reader

Comment by interactivecode | Hacker News Reader

Free market, it will open up a lot of opportunities for new companies

It is incredibly expensive to develop large airliners.

As I understand it, the only peer companies that do so are Airbus, COMAC, and Embraer (Edit: Bombardier ended with the A220).

Which one of these should replace Boeing?

There is also Bombardier. But none except Airbus makes planes in the same class as Boeing.

Airbus purchased the Bombardier program

Ah, thanks.

COMAC will succeed. Embraer is sort of boxed in and made the bad decision under Lula of making a deal with China that includes local manufacturing and technology transfers. They’re segmenting the market between them. Bombardier got killed by Boeing’s games with them and yes the remnants are the A220.

COMAC just had its first order from the Americas:

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/brazilian...

Four planes.

Airbus of the ones listed.

However, Northrop Grumman could also buy out Boeing's large aircraft bits and (re)enter the commercial airliner market.

I doubt Lockheed Martin would be interested, they're into smaller aircraft these days.

There is no free market for something like this. You need so much capital and there are better places to invest. Venture won’t do it. Government would have to and they simply have no understanding or appetite for funding startups for such spaces. Yes we could do so much better than Boeing but it’s more likely the government will repeatedly bail them out than do something about this.

So perhaps the free market doesn’t really exist. Only various sized barriers to entry

Reply on news.ycombinator.com