I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane, from planning to the first prototype, if they started right now. Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320 in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the hundreds?
Designing an airplane and producing a prototype isn't terribly difficult and many thousands of companies have done this.
The tricky part is designing the massive manufacturing apparatus around it that can produce them in volume (ask Elon how easy building cars is), satisfying the varying demands of hundreds of different airlines, many from developing nations, helping them set up financing, supporting the design in the field for 30-50 years, AND turning a profit. Each widget produced has an MSRP of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ask yourself why Lockheed permanently exited the commercial aircraft business 40 years ago, despite having what was regarded as the most technologically advanced design of the era, ahead of its time. Douglas went bankrupt and got bought out, Convair and everyone else failed and closed up shop.
You can't throw some engineers - they could be the smartest on the planet - into rented office space and become the next airplane company. There's more to it than designing the next WiFi-enabled food processor and slapping it together in Shenzhen.
Actually, thinking about Tesla is appropriate. No one really thought starting a new automotive manufacturer from scratch was possible, but Tesla did it. Yes, it's very hard and you'll probably fail, but if you do things different you might actually have a chance. The reasons all the old aircraft companies failed is probably the same reason Boeing is struggling. Don't copy what they've done in the past, make your own way. Yes, I know that building aircraft is a much higher hill to climb, but I think it might be worth it.
They could also join some of the small aircraft startups that are trying to gain a foothold. Maybe a cadre of experienced aircraft engineers would help them raise money and get a product to market faster.
I see this one as the saddest - if you are making good products the company will finally die.
VW (with Audi and Porsche) failing to deliver quality products is the top group. Apple crushing iOS release after release and becoming trillion dollar company.
Maybe that’s just the way to live and lead the company and market and I just should stop dreaming about quality.
> I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane.
About 20 years for a fully-certified new commercial airliner design. They could have experimental prototypes flying much sooner of course. Even in China, their state-owned effort to develop a new narrow-body airliner took about 15 years and that's very likely with the CCP greasing the skids for them as much as they could. They are still not certified in Europe or North America.
And some of the problems we've seen with Boeing have nothing to do with engineering, but problems with subcontractors, materials, and assembly.
I remember reading that one engineer spent 6 years designing „ventilation for seats 40-80” on one of the larger Airbuses. It seems like the amount of design and engineering work required for a prototype of a complete aircraft (assuming you buy the engines) is just immense.
How much of that time was actual engineering-tradeoff decision-making and how much of that was working in a large corporation with abundant communication overhead?
For a safety critical system, the work documenting, explaining, testing, validating, etc. a decision outstrips the work it took to make the decision. It is that way for a very good reason. The problem with it requiring so much work and time isn't that there's BigCorp bureaucracy that needs disrupting, it's that there isn't a problem with the amount of work and time required.
I'm aware of that, but the proportion of overhead varies per company. Six months seems like a long time for a ventilation system, and the point being made in this thread is that the runway available for some spun-off group of former Boeing engineers would need to accommodate the very long schedules of the design stage.
I'm just curious how much inflation there is in those schedules because I'm sure it's not zero.
But you make a good point that these long runways are because the overarching tradeoff is one that prefers taking as long as it takes.
I'm betting a lot of that is reviews, approval, documentation, testing, re-testing etc - but it may be required for building a safe aircraft, and for getting it licenced to fly.
Why? Have the government step in, nationalize Boeing, give the union a board seat, and keep shipping. The problem is Boeing management and their board enabling the train wreck; don't build from scratch, refactor.
Lottery tickets are not policy. SpaceX took decades to get to the success they realize today, having been founded in 2002, and it took a lot of luck to build a rocket shop from scratch. We must realize that companies are not built out of Legos, but ecosystems that require care, feeding, and are fragile systems.
PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX,… how many times does someone “win the lottery” before it’s not actually chance? Not saying anyone can repeat it, or a random IC could leave and succeed, but that space seems ripe for disruption. (Maybe not passenger planes, but cargo with less liability.)
If 90% of startups fail, why would you think winning wasn't mostly chance? Regardless of how many people work hard and grind, you can still fail (and most do, that's just life). Some are more lucky than others, and capital begets capital. Once you've "won" enough, it becomes much harder to lose, even if you make terrible forward decisions and run off the inertia of past wins (Twitter). Bezos built Amazon, but also has sunk somewhere between $10B and $20B into Blue Origin and it is still not terribly successful, for example, and demonstrates that even with resources and skill that success is potentially out of reach.
So, while I think the startup model is a fine way for investors to get exposure to an asset class that is the equivalent of 0DTE options, for the startup ecosystem to enable participants to play in the fiat that falls from those investment decisions, and perhaps some value to be generated, I would hazard that the model would not scale to meet the needs of the aerospace and defense marketplace at this time. All that is needed is skilled engineers and manufacturing practitioners to be enabled to do their best work, while keeping out of their way. Airbus demonstrates this, imho. They employ almost 150k workers, and successfully deliver products to customers that aren't fraught with manufacturing defects. They also have a book of work into the next decade, demonstrating customer confidence in the product and the org.
I don't entirely understand this logic. 99.9% of players that play competitive chess will never make master, but of course nobody would then say that becoming a chess master is just down to chance. What percent of startups are just bad ideas, outright cons, hair brained money-first schemes, or people entering into competitive domains (like eateries) without sufficient skill? IMO you're probably pushing 90% there!
To me the main thing that the failure of Blue Origin demonstrates is that the notion of "business" as some generalizable and all-applicable skill is nonsense. Bezos has done an amazing job of overseeing a digital marketplace, but that doesn't somehow mean he'd be amazing at overseeing an aerospace company. To me this just seems like it should be obvious.
The vision, talent, and other such things are just so radically different. For instance Musk picked up his first engine engineer [1] based on engines the guy was literally building in his garage. Bezos just staffed Blue Origin with a bunch of people from old space, and so it seems quite unsurprising that you just end up with another Boeing, but without the legacy hardware and political cronyism to use as crutches.
Musk has had 3 huge successes - Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. Having one such success might be luck. But when it's 3 times, dismissing it as luck is not very credible.
The same goes for Steve Jobs. 3 enormous successes.
And Bill Gates: 1. dominate 8 bit microcomputer software 2. pivot to 16 bit DOS. 3. pivot to 32 bit Windows. 4. pivot to internet. If you don't think that was a big deal, none of the other microcomputer software companies survived. Lotus, for example, muffed the pivot to 32 bits.
Pivoting to internet didn't work great for Bill Gates. Nobody really used MSN other than for chat and possibly hotmail, the browser wars were lost, and the bulk of the revenue was done on Windows at the time Nardella took the helm. However Microsoft was big enough to afford a failure.
Microsoft pivoted to the internet very successfully in the 90s under Gates, and the stock went up like a rocket.
Nadella didn't arrive until a full 10 years later.
I appreciate the value Nadella brought to the company (as I own some MSFT), but have pivoted away from Windows to Linux for development work. I remain with Windows 7 for other uses, so much so I bought a complete set of spare parts for my Win7 box for when it inevitably fails.
In the 90s what made MSFT shoot up was Windows becoming a household name, and Windows NT becoming the standard enterprise setup (often at the expense of mini-mainframes like the AS/400, rather than Unix); not Microsoft network.
The (almost successful) EEE strategy with Internet Explorer was the only part of Gates's internet strategy that survived the 90s.
This also explains why Ballmer went full in on Windows: there had been no pivot to speak of.
Sure, but can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment? Or, is it culture and an intangible ability to procure and orchestrate great people doing great work that leads to success? Think in systems. If you have the resources, and the physics demonstrate it can be done, the system is not properly configured, no?
can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment?
Clearly not in Bezos’s case.
There is no magic involved here, some people have the skill/experience to lead the design, build, and selling of innovative hardware, others don’t.
For example, for designing new rockets, one of the major things Musk innovated at SpaceX was the traditional aerospace design cycle. Instead of spending 5 years on countless analyses and few actual tests, like the incumbents did/do, SpaceX built and destructed as many prototypes as possible, learning rapidly and innovating. Musk knows what innovative design truly requires.
What did Bezos do? He hired a bunch of ex-Lockheed and Boeing engineers/leads (from an industry that for decades has not felt market-driven pressure to innovate), and those engineers/leads just kept doing things the old fashion way.
When the person in charge (Bezos) misses this detail, no amount of money or wishful thinking will fix this.
Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking about PayPal as a Musk success story:
Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking:
Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well.
Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk.
So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.
He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java.
The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence.
Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon.
Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks.
I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.
He also has his long and obnoxious obsession with x.com.
This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't worked all that well, because most within my circle still call it by the old name Twitter.
There is not one union, there are multiple employee unions, all fighting for their piece. Not only are there multiple unions, but even within a union, the older members usually vote against younger members.
It’s not a terrible idea, but also not a simple panacea to aligning interests in a business where payoffs happen decades in the future.
> Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320 in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the hundreds?
Bombardier thought so, and did so! They developed and introduced the C-series aircraft to compete with smaller 737s and A320/A319. After introduction, Boeing fucked them over so hard that they sold the aircraft program after introduction to Airbus for a token sum. Airbus now builds and sells the C-series as the A220.
Trying to translate your last sentence to English gives "Mauldite in itself very all the ligny". Trying to autocorrect it gives "Maudit soit toute la ligne" which apparently means "Damn the whole line". So... am I close? :D
