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Posted on 06/22/2006 8:48:32 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
If you want on or off the aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail.
May it get read far and wide. Absolutely devastating in what he says and spot-on in his analysis.
I doubt the Germans - let alone the French - would be willing to take the hit to national pride it would take to abandon the A380. They will let it's failure be their downfall. I fear they will end up being rescued by their governments via subsisdies and a bloody trade war will ensue as there is no way a bailout of Airbus can be seen as fair under WTO rules. Boeing would be stupid not to fight this one to the bitter end.
Airbus erred. They thought there was a market for super jumbo jets.
A few airlines agreed, for a while, but most are coming to realize that the growth markets aren't just in jumbo capacity, long haul routes. The expansion of short and medium haul routes, coupled with long haul capabilities gives Boeing the advantage of economy.
Buy a fleet of 787's and use them everywhere. Buy a fleet of A380s and you're stuck operating specific routes where the long haul market is large and consistent, which are quite few and heavily competitive. And the markets with short and medium haul needs aren't likely to have the airport facilities to handle the A380, nor are they likely to go to the expense of upgrading.
You made the first call to scrap the A380.
That might just happen!
Marketing 101: You do not produce a product and demand people buy it; you divine a demand and provide the product demanded.
They also forgot to talk with me and lots of other air passengers.
Personally, I don't want to fly on a plane with another 554 people.
Oh, this is just the introductory small version. The A380-900 is supposed to carry 800+ passengers.
This reminds me of the US Auto industry in the 60's. Build them bigger and put on tail fins and everything will be okay. I keep looking for those fins on the 380, they must be somewhere.
Boeing did the market research and Airbust didn't. Boeing studied the market for over a year. They even explored a joint venture with Airbus based on the a doubledeck 747. Again it was panned. Airplanes should be built to satisfy maket needs, not to compensate for the small members of European leaders.
Beautiful. Well put!
I thought from the beginning that Airbus was way over estimating the market for widebodies this size. But according to Abaloufia, there is/are major technical problem/s as well. I also heard that a number of top execs with Airbus dropped a load of shares on the market last week. May the SEC of Europe have good hunting.
Makes a lot of sense. What would Boeing do without a competitor?
I think Airbus rolled the dice, expecting 7's, and is slowly realizing they are about to get snake eyes.
/sarc
But there are other potential competitors. What if Embraer or Bombardier decided to start building an A320 and 737NG competitor? What if the teamed up with a company like Lockheed to build a fly-by-wire medium to large wide bodied aircraft with a similar cockpit as Embraer or Bombardier? Lockheed did build a technically superior wide bodied aircraft to the DC-10 in the seventies and eighties. Lockheed's problem with the L-1011 was that it was not part of a family of aircraft the way Boeing's and to a lesser extent McDonald Douglas's were. A coordination between a regional jet manufacturer and an older company previously in the commercial aviation business could have quite a bit of potential and decrease the cost and risk of becoming a competitor to Boeing or Airbus.
Victory is mine!
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