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OK, economy of scale is a bad choice of words, but maybe it should be economy of profile of revenue. I'm not a Boeing holder, but a european way of thinking is that it's revenues may be 60/40, commercial to military. I used to be in defense contracting and we used to be afforded huge NRE chunks of money from the Navy for product development and for testing to their mil-spec. For example, I may sell Boeing a feed thru capacitor filter for $300 each, but testing and compliance certs would be under a separate DOD purchase order which would run $1,200 per part. Stuff like shock and vibration, hot oil bath immersion, climatic cycling, shielded room testing, X-rays, etc...could bring revenues to our company which far exceeded reasonable fees. A properly running operation which does government contracting related to DOD/Mil spec products should always have revenues billed by the engineering department exceeding actual production on most projects. Commercial aircraft ventures do not have such luxuries, nor have huge military revenues coming their way. Boeing can co-mingle it's revenue streams in order to subsidize the commercial side when it's margins are running too thin.

Military Non-recurring engineering costs are big business. Boeing gets to cover most of it's with military contracts and then use spinoffs for commercial aircraft.

American aircraft manufacturers engineer down from military resources in commercial manufacturing. EU aircraft firms engineer up for the smaller pie military work, out of their commercial resources.

For an example, do you think that EU space agencies can compete with the space shuttle? Nope!!!!!! The EU could never mission profile a space shuttle like America's. Do you think that without a military component to the developmental side of the space shuttle it would ever have been pulled off? Nope.........

I used to do work at the NADC(naval air development center) Ninety percent of the engineers there are not government employees. They are there supporting Boeing projects, Grumman, McDD, Aliant Tech, EGG Rotron, Inland Motors, etc....All doing development work paid for by the DOD, yet produce intellectual results and design work which is later benefiting their commercial side of the business. Yes that's commerce, but it's entirely captive commerce at the direction of the DOD.