The political factor surely played a role here, but this bit at the end of the article also sheds light on Boeing's decline, which predates the current US administration.
While politics acted as a catalyst, Boeing was ultimately defeated by its own undoing.
This example only serves to highlight how popular narratives take hold and get reinforced by laypeople.
Boeing absolutely deserves to be raked through the coals over MCAS, over their deteriorating engineering culture, and over regulatory capture. But blame them for the things they actually carry responsibility for.
NTSB seems to think it’s Boeing’s responsibility to redesign the cowl to prevent this.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o
It's the same airplane as the MRTT, A330.
In the case you're referring too, the focus was on poor training and failure to follow up on earlier incidents. It's not the same as designing a system based around a single sensor that is known to fail or forgetting to bolt a door.
The airbus A320 family is associated with 1,490 fatalities, there’s just a vast number of flights daily so tiny risks add up. Companies buying new aircraft care far more about maintenance to fuel efficiency than a few rare incidents due to already corrected issues.
What? The A380 has never had a single fatality or even injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Accidents_and_inci...
> Incidents are over five years old have minimal impact in terms of current competition between Boing and Airbus.
Airbus (and Boeing) has a decade-long backlog. They absolutely do. https://flightplan.forecastinternational.com/2026/04/14/airb...
There's plenty of documentation to be found on the why and how, especially following the 737Max issues: https://team-fsa.com/insights/what-happened-to-boeings-cultu...
> Following the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing’s robust culture eroded. Subsequent safety issues with the Boeing 737 have put the company under international scrutiny and underscored the profound impact of a weakened corporate culture. As Forbes aptly put it, “Boeing’s current travails about safety issues with the 737 MAX 9 can arguably be traced to the company’s weak corporate culture.”
Or read https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/why-boeings-pr... for Harvard's take on the same situation.
I just pointed out in a different thread that software is going through that right now.
It’s a checkmate of the American system. Boeing delegated construction in parts of the country that needed jobs (=politics), who then botched the job and didn’t get sanctioned because it was bad optics to accuse those providers (2013 airframes). More recent events are also a checkmate of the ultrafinanciarization practices, a checkmate of the consultancy / provider / controller model, and a failure of corruption (the FAA/Boeing dinners inherited from the Macdonnell management) in a context where USA rips at the seams (industrial failure, no-one can be trusted as trustworthy) and tries to renew its ideology (apogee with the Trump elections).
That is a fair bit of politics that made Boeing fail.
The message here, and it’s granted if you’re not aviation, finance or political aware is Italy keeping their aviation sector EU based being In the EU themselves and most likely getting tremendously better financing.
While the Boeing incidents you mentioned are unfortunate and a true consequence of engineering culture eroding at Boeing, it does not dispel the true safety of aviation in general nor the high success of the 737 Max.
Patriot systen permanently delayed and price going up and up. Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...
Which Switzerland then reluctantly agreed was allowed under the terms.
As you say, totally being taken to the cleaners, and it is unclear how they escape in the short term.
The more this happens though, the more deals like Italy's make senese, irrespective of the performance comparison of the two planes.
If the US is going to be an unreliable partner, that will filter through in many many ways, and the US can hardly blame anyone but themselves (well, I'm sure some fingers will get pointed internally).
The Gulf states find themselves with too few interceptor missiles and a war in Iran.
The Japanese and Koreans are building as many war ships as they can.
Maybe they are and its just a lost cause with the US administration.
It doesn’t really matter if your product is better or cheaper, if the customer thinks that service and spare parts might possibly be withdrawn in the future for political (or whatever) reasons they won’t buy your product.
This is creating secondary fallout as the orders from various countries get re-prioritized. It is not strictly first-come, first-served order fulfillment; you can find your order pushed back in the queue for reasons.
No lobbying can change the risk assessment where America is the risk factor.
Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.
It's just that until recently USA at least pretended to care to not use those provisions too much.
Did they at least use European AI to edit this?
There are plenty of choices for Small and Medium size plane as well as private jet. Why are most commercial airline only buying Boeing and Airbus? And why others aren't making bigger planes to compete?
Since topic is tankers, PRC/RU has their own tankers, i.e. for military aviation it's not strictly as difficult since fuel cost less issue. But for strategic aviation (transport/tanking) big efficiency working with commercial chassis / turbofan efficiency.
Neither Boeing nor Airbus make their own engines. They get them from CFM, GE, Rolls-Royce. Like everyone else. That's not the differentiator.
But it just costs insanely much to get an airliner certified. Even Boeing has been held back by its clients demanding a shared type certificate for the 737max which caused all those deaths due to mcas.
There were of course more players but they've been bought up. And some emerging brands that are excluded from our markets due to sanctions like the Chinese Comac and the Sukhoi Superjet. The superjet is particularly affected because some of its systems were designed by western companies like Honeywell and they've had to make last-minute replacements after the Ukraine war that didn't exactly work out well.
And there's some other players. Embraer is creeping closer to the 737/A320 market.
But anyway so it isn't just Airbus and Boeing really.
It's differentiator in sense engine manufactures are part of western aviation industrial complex and can limit access, i.e. COMAC sanctions. Unless you're western core, you do not have guaranteed access. I think Embraer is creeping on to bottom end of narrowbody, but they're far from wide body. And with respect to topic, modern strategic tanking are wide body size, i.e. Embraer E190 is not same heavy league as KC46, MRTT, Y20, Il-78, and Embraer has not demonstrated ability to go beyond regional narrowbody. Fielded widebody options is really just Airbus/Boeing duopoly, AVIC/Xi'an, UAC stumbling along from legacy USSR stack.
There is a third, Embrarer. They have most of the market in small regional jets in some cases, but those are in reality very different than say a 777 or 787.
These two choices are conglomerates of what used to be a much larger set of manufacturers. In short Boeing, Airbus and it's suppliers are basically what is left of all the old big aerospace manufacturers.
These compete with the smaller versions of the Airbus A320 family (like the discontinued A318 "Baby Bus") or Boeing B737 family.
So, in that narrow-body and regional jet segment there are a few players.
But in the big wide-body (=2 aisles) long-range jets, there's only Airbus and Boeing.
For private jets there are Gulfstream, Bombardier, Textron, Dassault, and as you said Embraer. I think there was a recent new Entry, Honda from Japan.
Which is nothing compared to: 737 (447) 767 (30) 777 (35) 787 (88)
This. The entire market has been allowed to be monopolized through mergers and buy-outs. Russia used to have their own aerospace industry (and that fleet was reliable enough to be allowed to fly in Europe) but then Russia happened.
It's absolutely irrelevant what Russia did or could have done here in this industry.
Same with Chinese planes. If they ever manage to make a competitive passenger plane, it will not be allowed certification by US and European authorities purely for political reasons, the same way how their EVs are not allowed for sale in the US or how they aren't allowed to have ASML EUV machines. This isn't a fair game, never was.
The decisions on purchase of aerospace units is 90% (inter-)national politics and only 10% meritocracy, since both Boeing and Airbus are massive defense players making advanced killing machines, and no country wants to directly or indirectly fund the defense industry of their geopolitical rivals.
When a third country needs to chooses between Airbus or Boeing for their flag carrier fleet, they don't objectively compare the operational history and tech specs of Airbus vs Boeing and make the decision based on that, they just ask themselves "do I want to be in bed with EU-France or with Uncle Sam as my main ally and provider for the next 30+ years". Hence why most oil-rich middle eastern states chose Boeing as the US is their main defense provider anyway and don't want to anger them, especially when Donald Orange makes a visit to your state.
That's just how politics works when you operate at that level. Handshakes, dinners and bribes. Always has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac
They have delivered 185 aircraft to domestic airlines. Maybe Africa is next?
Note that they so far use engines from western companies - GE and Safran. In fact, the vast majority of their primary suppliers are from outside of China: https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinas-comac-a...
I guess it takes a bit of a war chest to get into this business simply because it isn't very easy.
I didn't just stop reading at this line, I slammed the back button like releasing an emergency exit door.
His last odd 'truth' about it was six hours ago https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1166240468099...
Pity, in Hong Kong I cannot read the wise words of the king.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/airbus-agrees-pay-ov...
When I was in aerospace we lost a not insignificant amount of contracts to Europeans that we had won during the RFP/requirements/evaluation phase because we did not do kickbacks (where we demonstratable win the selection process, but that be told to do a kickback scheme then lose when we said no). The Euros also spread money other ways to make us less attractive. In the US we'd win RPFs/evaluation phase only to lose out in the end due to politics. Sadly aerospace isn't a game of merit. Seemed like Australia, China, Japan, central/southern Africa didn't play games and selected on merit in the contracts we went after.
