There was also residual suspicion of European industry among US airliners. [...]
Against this backdrop, Airbus did everything it could to deemphasize its European heritage as it toured the US.
The European tech industry on the other hand managed to curb that suspicion by becoming a complete non-threat.
Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture. It makes sense that it would excel at an industry that requires putting safety above everything.
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
My overall feeling is "did they take off, or did Boeing stumble?", but looking at that chart of deliveries it seems Airbus started taking off almost 25 years ago. So the recent struggles of Boeing would really be just the straw that broke the camel's back. My guess is Airbus will dominate for the next few decades.
I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands out in my memories:
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
It's going to be interesting to watch COMAC really get going. They've been struggling for 17 years now to get the C919 into service. It's still using a US engine (currently embargoed by Trump, but that may change). The Aero Engine Corporation of China has built an engine which is supposed to be flight tested "soon".
This article is pushing its narrative so hard that it feels like the author's selection process was "I want to say something about Europe, which company would support my claims".
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
> They also mastered the world of DC lobbying, successfully outmaneuvering Boeing and Lockheed’s attempts to use anti-trust regulations to shut the European entrant out of the US market.
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but this concluding sentence annoyed me greatly:
> Governments are generally better at supporting companies in established markets where innovation takes place slowly and incrementally. This is likely why state-backed efforts have found it easier to be competitive against aerospace companies than Silicon Valley giants working at breakneck pace
I always finds it fascinating that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft (granted the later isn't a “silicon valley giant” proper) managed to build a narrative portraying themselves as “innovative companies” when they are the opposite of that: they are, and have been for almost two decades now or even more for Microsoft, very close to the complacent and short-term-profit-maximizer Boeing portrayed in this article.
They just happen to benefit from a much stronger network effect than Boeing, and work in a business where economies of scale are insane.
There is also the idea that innovation is hard in established organisations. William Langewiesche's book "fly by wire" highlights some of the improvements that Boeing no dought knew about, but hadn't got round to. They were busy playing catch-up.
It's simply a company that operates in a rare industry where safety and reliability is more important than time to market or cost. Which makes risk-averse, hyper-conservative and consensus-seeking European culture at a relative advantage vs American "fake it till you make it" one.
Isn't Airbus also just succeedingcompany to Sud Aviation and Aerospatiale? They've done Caravel jetliner, Exocet missile, Puma helicopter, early Ariane rockets, etc etc, by the time they started working on A300... Having such experiences would certainly help designing and delivering great airliners.
I wouldn't say so confidently that Airbus is better than Boeing. Its just better than Boeing at THIS moment. They've been trading places over the decades. A company selling commercial airliners is really only as good as the order book for its latest aircraft. And a single stumble in developing a model can sink your orderbook for an entire decade or more.
Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.
Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.
There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.
It may be painful to admit, but the Airbus model simply works better than the Boeing model. Whatever advantages America has, they don't apply to commercial/passenger aerospace anymore.
A quick control-F didn't find the name John Leahy. Without that part of the story, I think you really miss what took Airbus from an also-run European institution to a global force. Some of his story there is really something.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 45.9 ms ] threadStacked charts for two families work better that way than stack from baseline.
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
No amount of engineering can compete with good old bribes.
> Governments are generally better at supporting companies in established markets where innovation takes place slowly and incrementally. This is likely why state-backed efforts have found it easier to be competitive against aerospace companies than Silicon Valley giants working at breakneck pace
I always finds it fascinating that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Microsoft (granted the later isn't a “silicon valley giant” proper) managed to build a narrative portraying themselves as “innovative companies” when they are the opposite of that: they are, and have been for almost two decades now or even more for Microsoft, very close to the complacent and short-term-profit-maximizer Boeing portrayed in this article.
They just happen to benefit from a much stronger network effect than Boeing, and work in a business where economies of scale are insane.
Oh, come now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
https://youtu.be/ln-ffJM9sJc
Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.
Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.
There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.