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.
French engineers were known for their willingness to embrace advanced, high-risk technologies to gain a decisive advantage in the aerospace market.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
Yes. Also the way how internal collaboration works. A lot of focus on relationship building and pre-alignments vs a content-first approach („people will accept it if it’s just correct enough“). In any real-world situation that matters it will always take a bit of both
What’s your source for that? It reads like a cliché, especially when you know about the arguably stronger engineering background in France when it comes to aerospace.
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
That level of sniping also means that groupthink can't happen, which is a major problem at Boeing: nobody wanted to speak up about obvious problems, and those that did saw their careers ended.
It’s fair to describe Boeing’s problems as being caused by Boeing now being actually McDonnell Douglas. It’s only called Boeing because MD had a terrible reputation.
Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.
And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.
If we talk about the same „innovation“ offshoot, it happened right after I left the company. I think the cultural change that the top leadership at that time wanted to push was just too much to not cause a backlash. A new CTO who was perceived as an outsider, a somewhat implied message that the Silicon Valley’s way of working was superior to the company‘s traditional approach, and the internal realization that Airbus started to lag behind leading to the typical defensive behaviors. Curious how the culture evolved since then
I left A^3 (or Acubed, groan) 5 years ago, to relocate overseas, so I don't know how it's been since. There was definitely a bit of a "Silicon Valley knows best" attitude that I didn't buy into (because the people I met at Airbus were pretty damn sharp ... while I felt very overpaid, but anyway).
There was always some talk of maneuvering around other groups who wanted our project or wanted to beat us to the punch or whatever, which felt a bit pointlessly unproductive to me, so I did my best to ignore it and try to just deliver.
I did get to meet some cool people, though, including Grazia Vittadini, so I can't complain.
While there is some amount of sniping and banter everywhere whenever Americans and French will have different ways of expressing " this is 90% great" or "this is only 10% usable"
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
Office politics, I guess, though it was kind of tinged since the offices were in different countries, but it still was Airbus-level, not nation-level, I guess.
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher, the rocket thing is their side show and a way to subsidize our nuclear launcher development not the other way around.
Also ag studied a reusable launcher in the early 2000s and found it not viable economically, because it wasn't, to make it work space x had to have massive government subsidies in guaranteed launch AND starlink which was essentially let our own investors and the dod feed the finance of space x until it's viable. Which is a good strategy mind you, but as a result pointing the finger at ag being supported by government funding as if it was a bad sign is rather absurd.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Yes, by borrowing. Any meaningful reforms seems infeasible due to social and political reasons.
> Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher
Yes, so we agree its hardly much more than a government military contractor making its money from legacy products and not some sort of an innovative company.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
For the past 18 years at least, France has been trapped in an economic stagnation driven by terrible economic policies (as if trying to outcompete eastern Europe on cost wasn't a great idea). The only thing that keeps the economist from collapsing entirely is the perpetual stimulus from public spending using foreign loans. (This also will probably stop being sufficient soon since the governing party seems to be obsessed by the idea of reducing public spending instead of fixing their economic policy).
Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years, in fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s, and in 2020 for the first time since the turn of the century our deficit was reaching a point allowing our debt to start lowering instead of climbing, and was stopped by a combination of both covid and then the energy crisis and the cover offered to french people.
We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others), but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
Inflation != currency devaluation and France had a pretty tame inflation compared to many of its neighbors (significantly less than Belgium for instance), which again is a good illustration that inflation has nothing to do with the money supply or the value of a currency, no matter how prevalent this myth is.
> Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years
I'd be happy to live in a timeline where the Economist criticizes the bullshit that “supply chain economics” is, but if you paid attention you'd be aware that it's not really their editorial line.
> fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s
You should thank the boomers for retiring, not the economic policy. (By the way, employment went up in pretty much all of Europe for the 2010-2020 period while the economy stagnated in most places but the east)
> We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others
Standoff caused exactly by the government dogmatic stand over their failed economic policy …
> but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
It is not, this is government narrative. The “pension problem” is merely an economic activity problem. When the real wages go down (which is did in France since 2017) while pensions are inflation adjusted, obviously the share of income that goes through pensions increases but that's not a “pensions problem” it's a wage issue (and economy health issue).
In fact, public spending per capita is in the middle of what remwins of the EU15 (just above all other Mediterranean countries and below all the others). The reason why the spendings per capita ratio is too high is not because the spendings are too high, but because the GDP is far too low due to inept policies.
NASA once offered the UK to launch its satellites almost for free. That offer was rescinded as soon as the UK abandoned its national space program. [1]
From a European perspective, it’s impossible to look at the current situation and believe it would be the same without Ariane 6, even if Ariane 6 itself isn’t particularly competitive. Sovereign access to space is invaluable. Once you lose it, you hand an extraordinary amount of leverage to the White House. And make no mistake: that leverage will be used, whatever the color of the administration.
That started before airbus. People forget that Aerospatiale (a founder of airbus) was a partner in Concord (aka Concorde). That is where cross-boarder aerospace really got started. Many saw such partnerships as key to keeping Europe together politically. Without Concorde-Airbus, europe might have looked very different.
I have met many former Airbus engineers and former Airbus contractors. Every single time I have heard nothing but bad things about the company.
Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace.
In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be a challenge.
Super sorry that these have been your experiences. Working for a very different company now, I again ended up in a highly international setting and - with good leadership - it can be incredibly enriching (the company is the result of several global mergers). Unfortunately, the way it works in many companies nowadays, the only situation where teams experience working with other countries are in settings that are imbalanced from the start (e.g., after offshoring)
Dealing with offshoring was very tedious, as you now have even more layers. Digital only communication, time differences, etc.
But in person is also very bad. I never was part of a well functioning multi cultural team. And every homogenous team I have been in was well functioning. At this point I will actively seek out employment in teams where I am only among native speakers and as far as possible only among natives.
>Super sorry
What are you sorry about? I quit the job, partly because I couldn't stand having half a dozen different communication barriers.
>it can be incredibly enriching
I have never found a single positive aspect. None of the multi cultural teams have "enriched" me in any way, most often they made me dislike the other cultures.
They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.
20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.
386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.
561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.
1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.
Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).
The Concorde numbers are so low the confidence interval is much larger than the others. It could be a freak accident there was only one catastrophic failure. And, mind you, that catastrophic failure was a pretty freakish accident itself.
The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.
It’d be fair to say it’s one of the few government-sponsored multinational companies that thrived. There was a time European governments pushed for strategic mergers to better compete against American companies.
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).
> 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.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
Southwest's 737 MAX contract had a penalty clause of $1 million per aircraft that would trigger if Boeing's delivery contract for the 737 MAX failed to meet certain standards, particularly Southwest's insistence that no flight simulator training be required for the MAX
Meaning, the roots of the “no new type rating” requirement come from Southwest, not Boeing.
Yes. The problem wasn’t the airframe, nor even frankly the engines, it was the combination plus the decision to fix an aerodynamic instability with an undocumented software patch.
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster), you'd have to replace the landing gear, and with that you'd also need to make changes to the airframe itself.
The 737’s airframe’s excellence is the reason Boeing was loath to let it go. It’s a really good airframe, and a market fit to boot for the transition from hub and spoke. A clean-sheet design for the 737 would look a lot like the 737. That is what makes the shortcuts tempting.
Engines, avionics and control software are distinct components and not part of the airframe. (Debatable only on engine cowlings and mounts. Neither of which were relevant to the 737 Max’s faults.)
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
This really isn't an accurate description of what happened. In fact, the contrast between Boeing and Airbus is instructive. Boeing is exactly what happens in the event of unregulated capitalism, which is endless mergers and attempts to exploit monopoly power and relentless efforts to satisfy the financial sector.
The end state of unregulated capitalism for a company like Boeing is a “capital-light” company based entirely on monopoly power and relationships that hardly manufactures anything at all, having outsourced everything to subsidiaries and suppliers to satisfy the return on capital requirements of Wall Street.
The Airbus approach is a clear contrast to this. The fact that Boeing has imploded while Airbus has thrived is, in fact, a very helpful counterpoint to reflexive and idiotic market fundamentalist ideology.
Airbus literally is the result of mergers of many countries aircraft manufacturers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus], including - from that list, Messerschmitt.
In capitalist systems. Boeing is also still a going concern, and is a major competitor to Airbus. It hasn’t ’imploded’.
It is having some difficulty right now - but more due to the entire US economy going through a ‘narcissistic’ phase.
Airbus has plenty of issues a decade or two ago, including very similar issues to what Boeing has recently been going through.
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.
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.
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.
The article says they did a lot of customer research and even lobbying, leading to fuel efficiency focus and reduced size, and sticking the finger up to various offended European countries (not taking delegates to US, eschewing RR engines). This seems like savvy being sustained over decades. It must be cultural.
Even if you ask every person to walk the earth what they want, that won't allow you to know future demand. The market shifted largely from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point during development. Without the benefit of hindsight, it must have looked like a solid bet.
A380 was also the result of "customer interviews", but after all the years needed to complete the project the customers have changed their mind, preferring direct flights over hub-and-spoke flights.
When A380 started, and even when it was delivered first, the answers to "what will be the preferred form of airline transport network organisation, in detail" was not yet fully answered.
And A380 simultaneously served as base (in many critical areas) for the quite quickly made A350 et al
IMHO Europe changed massively since the 80s and 90s in that regard, though.
Arianespace was pretty much SpaceX of the 80s and there were quite a few tech companies back then. Due to various reasons stagnation entirely took over Europe after the start of this millennium. Hard to say why. Certainly not putting all the blame on them (since Britain isn't doing that great either) but I don't think especially the Euro and the EU becoming much stronger helped.
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.
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 think this is about right. About a quarter-century ago, airbus finally became a manufacturer that could go head to head with the 737 and win more often than not. Since then they’ve generally gone from strength to strength while Boeing has been primarily concerned with financial engineering.
It is quite simple, they had the more recent cleansheet single aisle airframe design with enough ground clearance for modern high bypass engine designs. This has baked in a lot of inherent efficiencies including manufacturability meanwhile Boeing leadership refused to invest in a 737 replacement needed in the 2000s.
Don't forget the greatest stumble with the Bombardier CSeries.
I feel like if Boeing shut their mouth and bit their tongue at a little casual dumping they wouldn't have ended up with Airbus taking over the CS100 and adding yet another directly competitive aircraft into an "all Airbus" lineup that Boeing didn't have.
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.
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.
Which is why Airbus is around today. The amount of launch aide (including Marshall plan dollars!) that the European governments flushed into Airbus to keep them afloat for years is why they are still around.\
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".
> 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.
When you really think of those companies they mostly seem stagnant. They buy other companies, but for innovative company with essentially unlimited amounts of resources. Wouldn't you expect a big innovation at least say every other year?
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.
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.
How would you say their cultures compliment each other? I would be interested to hear more concrete, and especially how it ends up when you mix them.
French engineers were known for their willingness to embrace advanced, high-risk technologies to gain a decisive advantage in the aerospace market.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
Yes. Also the way how internal collaboration works. A lot of focus on relationship building and pre-alignments vs a content-first approach („people will accept it if it’s just correct enough“). In any real-world situation that matters it will always take a bit of both
> Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
Airbus uses US measurements - i.e., not the metric system?
What’s your source for that? It reads like a cliché, especially when you know about the arguably stronger engineering background in France when it comes to aerospace.
Seconding this, I'm Dutch and I still struggle to see how they'd complement each other.
Well that's just because you hate both the French and the Germans ;)
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
That level of sniping also means that groupthink can't happen, which is a major problem at Boeing: nobody wanted to speak up about obvious problems, and those that did saw their careers ended.
It’s fair to describe Boeing’s problems as being caused by Boeing now being actually McDonnell Douglas. It’s only called Boeing because MD had a terrible reputation.
Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.
Maybe, yeah.
And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.
I just remember being shocked by the negativity.
If we talk about the same „innovation“ offshoot, it happened right after I left the company. I think the cultural change that the top leadership at that time wanted to push was just too much to not cause a backlash. A new CTO who was perceived as an outsider, a somewhat implied message that the Silicon Valley’s way of working was superior to the company‘s traditional approach, and the internal realization that Airbus started to lag behind leading to the typical defensive behaviors. Curious how the culture evolved since then
I left A^3 (or Acubed, groan) 5 years ago, to relocate overseas, so I don't know how it's been since. There was definitely a bit of a "Silicon Valley knows best" attitude that I didn't buy into (because the people I met at Airbus were pretty damn sharp ... while I felt very overpaid, but anyway).
There was always some talk of maneuvering around other groups who wanted our project or wanted to beat us to the punch or whatever, which felt a bit pointlessly unproductive to me, so I did my best to ignore it and try to just deliver.
I did get to meet some cool people, though, including Grazia Vittadini, so I can't complain.
While there is some amount of sniping and banter everywhere whenever Americans and French will have different ways of expressing " this is 90% great" or "this is only 10% usable"
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
IDK, I'm French, and worked in the US and I can't say my perception of the US way of working generally matches yours.
I've never worked in France so I can't compare there.
Was that country political politics or office politics politics?
Office politics, I guess, though it was kind of tinged since the offices were in different countries, but it still was Airbus-level, not nation-level, I guess.
> I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project
Cf Arianespace.
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher, the rocket thing is their side show and a way to subsidize our nuclear launcher development not the other way around.
Also ag studied a reusable launcher in the early 2000s and found it not viable economically, because it wasn't, to make it work space x had to have massive government subsidies in guaranteed launch AND starlink which was essentially let our own investors and the dod feed the finance of space x until it's viable. Which is a good strategy mind you, but as a result pointing the finger at ag being supported by government funding as if it was a bad sign is rather absurd.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
Yes, by borrowing. Any meaningful reforms seems infeasible due to social and political reasons.
> Also arianespace group has 60% of their revenue from the development of the m51 nuclear launcher
Yes, so we agree its hardly much more than a government military contractor making its money from legacy products and not some sort of an innovative company.
I wouldn't exactly call the world's fastest ballistic missile (Mach 25!) a legacy product...
That kind of delta-v makes it almost an orbital launcher.
> France is being kept alive by paying itself? Makes no sense.
For the past 18 years at least, France has been trapped in an economic stagnation driven by terrible economic policies (as if trying to outcompete eastern Europe on cost wasn't a great idea). The only thing that keeps the economist from collapsing entirely is the perpetual stimulus from public spending using foreign loans. (This also will probably stop being sufficient soon since the governing party seems to be obsessed by the idea of reducing public spending instead of fixing their economic policy).
Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years, in fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s, and in 2020 for the first time since the turn of the century our deficit was reaching a point allowing our debt to start lowering instead of climbing, and was stopped by a combination of both covid and then the energy crisis and the cover offered to french people.
We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others), but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
You forgot to mention that in 2020 currencies were devalued through severe QE, which means it is easier in 2025 to pay back 2M EUR than it was in 2020
Inflation != currency devaluation and France had a pretty tame inflation compared to many of its neighbors (significantly less than Belgium for instance), which again is a good illustration that inflation has nothing to do with the money supply or the value of a currency, no matter how prevalent this myth is.
Check the money supply during COVID, it was insane.
Check the money supply after the financial crisis, it was insane too and the inflation remained below target for a decade.
Covid induced inflation has nothing to do with the money supply and all to do with supply chain disruption.
> Well I would disagree with that and laugh at the fact that this exact analysis has been published by The Economist and similar for the past 50 years
I'd be happy to live in a timeline where the Economist criticizes the bullshit that “supply chain economics” is, but if you paid attention you'd be aware that it's not really their editorial line.
> fact for the first time France unemployment numbers have gone below the numbers they climbed to in the 90s
You should thank the boomers for retiring, not the economic policy. (By the way, employment went up in pretty much all of Europe for the 2010-2020 period while the economy stagnated in most places but the east)
> We do have issues and for the past 3 years they've been amplified by our political standoff (parliament cut in three third and none agree to work with the others
Standoff caused exactly by the government dogmatic stand over their failed economic policy …
> but the core of our economic woes is from pensions.
It is not, this is government narrative. The “pension problem” is merely an economic activity problem. When the real wages go down (which is did in France since 2017) while pensions are inflation adjusted, obviously the share of income that goes through pensions increases but that's not a “pensions problem” it's a wage issue (and economy health issue).
In fact, public spending per capita is in the middle of what remwins of the EU15 (just above all other Mediterranean countries and below all the others). The reason why the spendings per capita ratio is too high is not because the spendings are too high, but because the GDP is far too low due to inept policies.
NASA once offered the UK to launch its satellites almost for free. That offer was rescinded as soon as the UK abandoned its national space program. [1]
From a European perspective, it’s impossible to look at the current situation and believe it would be the same without Ariane 6, even if Ariane 6 itself isn’t particularly competitive. Sovereign access to space is invaluable. Once you lose it, you hand an extraordinary amount of leverage to the White House. And make no mistake: that leverage will be used, whatever the color of the administration.
[1] https://curious-droid.com/323/black-arrow-lipstick-rocket-br...
That started before airbus. People forget that Aerospatiale (a founder of airbus) was a partner in Concord (aka Concorde). That is where cross-boarder aerospace really got started. Many saw such partnerships as key to keeping Europe together politically. Without Concorde-Airbus, europe might have looked very different.
I have met many former Airbus engineers and former Airbus contractors. Every single time I have heard nothing but bad things about the company.
Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace.
In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be a challenge.
Super sorry that these have been your experiences. Working for a very different company now, I again ended up in a highly international setting and - with good leadership - it can be incredibly enriching (the company is the result of several global mergers). Unfortunately, the way it works in many companies nowadays, the only situation where teams experience working with other countries are in settings that are imbalanced from the start (e.g., after offshoring)
Dealing with offshoring was very tedious, as you now have even more layers. Digital only communication, time differences, etc.
But in person is also very bad. I never was part of a well functioning multi cultural team. And every homogenous team I have been in was well functioning. At this point I will actively seek out employment in teams where I am only among native speakers and as far as possible only among natives.
>Super sorry
What are you sorry about? I quit the job, partly because I couldn't stand having half a dozen different communication barriers.
>it can be incredibly enriching
I have never found a single positive aspect. None of the multi cultural teams have "enriched" me in any way, most often they made me dislike the other cultures.
> Europe is a graveyard of failed national champions … Airbus is the rare success story.
Oh, come now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.
It is like saying that the tunnel that links the France and Great Britain was a failure
And just some context on the technological side:
20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.
386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.
561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.
1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.
Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).
The Concorde numbers are so low the confidence interval is much larger than the others. It could be a freak accident there was only one catastrophic failure. And, mind you, that catastrophic failure was a pretty freakish accident itself.
The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.
Right, everything must about increasing the scoreboard in the bank UI.
"the rare European company that is better than its American rival" this is a shitpost
It’d be fair to say it’s one of the few government-sponsored multinational companies that thrived. There was a time European governments pushed for strategic mergers to better compete against American companies.
I stopped reading the article after this sentence. Now I am scanning the comments.
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).
> 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.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
What are you talking about? Which airframe scandal?
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
Southwest's 737 MAX contract had a penalty clause of $1 million per aircraft that would trigger if Boeing's delivery contract for the 737 MAX failed to meet certain standards, particularly Southwest's insistence that no flight simulator training be required for the MAX
Meaning, the roots of the “no new type rating” requirement come from Southwest, not Boeing.
Presumably Boeing weren't under duress when they signed the contract.
The Boeing execs had their bonuses held against their heads.
737 Max was a compendium of failures. Airframe wasn’t one of them. If anything, the 737 series’ airframes are perfected to a fault.
Didn't the problems start when Boeing began using new engines on an old airframe for the Max?
https://www.eetimes.com/software-wont-fix-boeings-faulty-air...
Yes. The problem wasn’t the airframe, nor even frankly the engines, it was the combination plus the decision to fix an aerodynamic instability with an undocumented software patch.
Tons of problems that only are accepted due being grandfathered in.
> Tons of problems that only are accepted due being grandfathered in
What are you basing this on?
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
> a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max
Instrumentation. Not airframe.
Boeing’s failure was in trying to make a great airframe compensate for failings in other systems.
It is a lackluster airframe but with an entire workforce certified to fly it and thus it is forced to stay around.
Just look at the anti-ice issues preventing 737 Max 7 and 10 to be certified.
> Just look at the anti-ice issues preventing 737 Max 7 and 10 to be certified
Not airframe!
Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster), you'd have to replace the landing gear, and with that you'd also need to make changes to the airframe itself.
Ignore everything that makes the 737 a modern passenger aircraft and it’s awesome!
> Ignore everything that makes the 737 a modern passenger aircraft and it’s awesome!
You’re moving the goalposts because you didn’t understand what an airframe is.
The engine anti ice system are literally generic aerodynamic parts and control systems provided by Boeing.
You know, part of the same assembly causing MCAS to exist.
But that is of course not part of the airframe.
> that is of course not part of the airframe
Correct.
The 737’s airframe’s excellence is the reason Boeing was loath to let it go. It’s a really good airframe, and a market fit to boot for the transition from hub and spoke. A clean-sheet design for the 737 would look a lot like the 737. That is what makes the shortcuts tempting.
Engines, avionics and control software are distinct components and not part of the airframe. (Debatable only on engine cowlings and mounts. Neither of which were relevant to the 737 Max’s faults.)
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
You've got the whole thing wrong.
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
They became monopolies/state sponsored entities.
It happens everywhere under every market system.
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
This really isn't an accurate description of what happened. In fact, the contrast between Boeing and Airbus is instructive. Boeing is exactly what happens in the event of unregulated capitalism, which is endless mergers and attempts to exploit monopoly power and relentless efforts to satisfy the financial sector.
The end state of unregulated capitalism for a company like Boeing is a “capital-light” company based entirely on monopoly power and relationships that hardly manufactures anything at all, having outsourced everything to subsidiaries and suppliers to satisfy the return on capital requirements of Wall Street.
The Airbus approach is a clear contrast to this. The fact that Boeing has imploded while Airbus has thrived is, in fact, a very helpful counterpoint to reflexive and idiotic market fundamentalist ideology.
Airbus literally is the result of mergers of many countries aircraft manufacturers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus], including - from that list, Messerschmitt.
In capitalist systems. Boeing is also still a going concern, and is a major competitor to Airbus. It hasn’t ’imploded’.
It is having some difficulty right now - but more due to the entire US economy going through a ‘narcissistic’ phase.
Airbus has plenty of issues a decade or two ago, including very similar issues to what Boeing has recently been going through.
The problems with Boeing aren’t generic. They’re created by people, and policies.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-a...
The problems Airbus had were also created by people and policies?
History rhymes for a reason.
I don’t think the problems Airbus have had are comparable to the likely criminal, and clearly negligent, meltdown that Boeing has had.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_affair]
[http://www.crashdehabsheim.net/CRenglish%20phot.pdf]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447] - similar type of issue (likely) as the MAX problems. Improper training + bad sensors + design that is too prone to problems.
Just to name a few.
Potentially worse.
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.
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.
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.
The article says they did a lot of customer research and even lobbying, leading to fuel efficiency focus and reduced size, and sticking the finger up to various offended European countries (not taking delegates to US, eschewing RR engines). This seems like savvy being sustained over decades. It must be cultural.
> and reduced size
After launching, then dropping, the A380. Perhaps they didn’t do enough customer interviews there.
Even if you ask every person to walk the earth what they want, that won't allow you to know future demand. The market shifted largely from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point during development. Without the benefit of hindsight, it must have looked like a solid bet.
This is explained in TFA.
A380 was also the result of "customer interviews", but after all the years needed to complete the project the customers have changed their mind, preferring direct flights over hub-and-spoke flights.
When A380 started, and even when it was delivered first, the answers to "what will be the preferred form of airline transport network organisation, in detail" was not yet fully answered.
And A380 simultaneously served as base (in many critical areas) for the quite quickly made A350 et al
> Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture.
I mean, in this particular space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
IMHO Europe changed massively since the 80s and 90s in that regard, though.
Arianespace was pretty much SpaceX of the 80s and there were quite a few tech companies back then. Due to various reasons stagnation entirely took over Europe after the start of this millennium. Hard to say why. Certainly not putting all the blame on them (since Britain isn't doing that great either) but I don't think especially the Euro and the EU becoming much stronger helped.
Boeing had a tough patch, but anyone that follows aviation knows Airbus has had its fair share of massive screw-ups over the years too.
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.
There's a very nice video from Mustard about the Airbus story.
https://youtu.be/ln-ffJM9sJc
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 think this is about right. About a quarter-century ago, airbus finally became a manufacturer that could go head to head with the 737 and win more often than not. Since then they’ve generally gone from strength to strength while Boeing has been primarily concerned with financial engineering.
It is quite simple, they had the more recent cleansheet single aisle airframe design with enough ground clearance for modern high bypass engine designs. This has baked in a lot of inherent efficiencies including manufacturability meanwhile Boeing leadership refused to invest in a 737 replacement needed in the 2000s.
Don't forget the greatest stumble with the Bombardier CSeries.
I feel like if Boeing shut their mouth and bit their tongue at a little casual dumping they wouldn't have ended up with Airbus taking over the CS100 and adding yet another directly competitive aircraft into an "all Airbus" lineup that Boeing didn't have.
It started its engines and left the ground
The chart of Airbus vs Boeing hull sales would have benefited from a center line Airbus above boeing below style.
Stacked charts for two families work better that way than stack from baseline.
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.
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.
This seems a little disingenuous - the US taxpayer will always keep Boeing solvent, even if they were down to selling one 737 per year.
Which is why Airbus is around today. The amount of launch aide (including Marshall plan dollars!) that the European governments flushed into Airbus to keep them afloat for years is why they are still around.\
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".
> 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.
When you really think of those companies they mostly seem stagnant. They buy other companies, but for innovative company with essentially unlimited amounts of resources. Wouldn't you expect a big innovation at least say every other year?
Tldr: turbine engines