9 votes

How Boeing tried to kill a great airplane—and got outplayed

2 comments

  1. cptcobalt
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    As a minor-class avgeek—yes, I know exactly how this sounds—Boeing no longer exemplifies the excitement of air travel for me. I'm quite excited to fly on the A220 at some point, it seems like an...

    As a minor-class avgeek—yes, I know exactly how this sounds—Boeing no longer exemplifies the excitement of air travel for me. I'm quite excited to fly on the A220 at some point, it seems like an airplane built to play both the economy and passenger comfort game, and succeeds at both.

    It accused Bombardier of “dumping” the jets to Delta by selling each airplane at $14 million below production costs.

    It's quite well known that the "list price" of airplanes is not what they're sold at, due to things like bulk deals, upfront payments on aircraft that won't be delivered for many many years, etc.

    The Daily Beast also could have pointed out a bit of semi-relevant irony here: Boeing Acquired the 717 (formerly the MD-95) in the McDonnell Douglas merger. This very merger is what led McDonnell Douglas staff to proliferate in Boeing's upper management. This caused a company culture shift from a quality-focus, to a profit-focus, with a bit of a disregard for innovation. The only truly new aircraft after this merger was the 787. In that time, Airbus released both the A380 and A350, two major projects. (It's also deeply fallen for the same re-engine trap Boeing has too.)

    2 votes
  2. sublime_aenima
    Link
    This seems to be a similar story to several "too huge to fail" companies that are starting to fail. Corporate America seems to have fallen away from innovation and growth and has been picked apart...

    As Boeing fell back on risk-averse designs and cost-cutting, it simultaneously adopted a self-enriching policy of stock buybacks and a new focus on quarterly earnings.

    This seems to be a similar story to several "too huge to fail" companies that are starting to fail. Corporate America seems to have fallen away from innovation and growth and has been picked apart from the inside. It's become pretty rare now a days for these huge companies to come out with game changing technology and they instead just poach smaller companies. And in the end when they inevitably fail, they'll look to the government to bail them out or they'll liquidate the company and give huge payouts to the very execs that caused them to crash.