I was under the impression it was quite nice and had partially eaten the lunch of Airbus' A380 by making longer flights with smaller plane economically advantageous.
The 787 is not bad. Its a great aircraft and they have sold a shit-ton of them.
But it was also a program that went hilariously over budget. Nearly costing as much as the A380. It had a whole bunch of problems and still has problems today. Lots of production issues.
This had lead to a situation where they will need to sold literally 1500 or more planes to break even on the program. And 1500 is a gigantic amount of wide-bodies.
The 787 didn't really eat A380s lunch. Its more like 2 companies both thought about what the best investment would be for the future. Boeing picked the right plane. Airbus picked the wrong plane. The competitor to the A380 was the 747-8 and the 777.
Had Airbus not totally misread the market and invested in totally the wrong market. The Dreamliner could have backfired on Boeing. If Airbus had a 787 serious competitor out at the same time, the 787 might never have sold more then 1500 times. They already have total order of around 1800 and there are likely gone be many more because Airbus doesn't have a perfect competitor plane.
In the wide-body market, Boeing is still totally competitive with Airbus. Its the narrow body market where Airbus is kicking Boeing ass.
It's a bit larger, more in the range of the 777 than the 787.
Roughly, it used to be A330 vs 767 and A340 vs 777, the A330 and the 777 were the winners in these segments. The 787 was built to beat the A330, and it did, and the A350 was built to beat the 777, and it might.
Airbus reacted to the 787 with a re-engined A330, the A330neo, which was not a great success, but not a total flop. Boeing re-engined and enlarged the 777 to create the 777X, whose smaller variant positioned against the A350 is a slow seller, but whose larger variant, which has no direct competitor, has seen some sales - if Boeing manages to get it out of the door, the program is again hugely delayed and over budget.
> Incidentally, that also sold a shit-ton of 737 MAX. Maybe not the best metric to choose.
You have to think about the difference between narrow and wide bodies.
Yes they sold many 737 MAXs but not compared to Airbus narrow bodies.
> Missed the market by so much, they are pulling the A380s out of storage.
Sure. Nice for them. But that doesn't change anything for Airbus, they are not gone sell more of them. There was never a question if A380 would go away competently, its the right aircraft for many airlines.
Lets be real, Airbus sold 250 A380 and is never gone build more. Boeing sold 1800 787s and will sell many more. Its not really a competition what was the better investment.
> The A350 _is_ the perfect competitor. The two planes are, by their design, not competing in the same segments.
Sure if you don't understand the industry.
The very biggest 787 is slightly competitive with the smallest A350. But that is not the focus of either of those planes design.
Airbus deliberately did not build a 787 competitor, they believed the market would would already be mostly captured. So they build a competitor to the 777 instead, with the goal of replacing older wide bodies like the 777, 747 and 380.
The A330 NEO is the more direct competitor to the 787 core business.
> Missed the market by so much, they are pulling the A380s out of storage.
A380s are being pulled out of storage because they, like many other types of planes, were parked due to COVID and travel restrictions and are now returning to their previous service.
> A380s are being pulled out of storage because they, like many other types of planes, were parked due to COVID
Yes, but not quite. They were put into storage with the understanding that it would be their final resting place, as the hub-and-spoke demand Airbus had anticipated lost, pre-COVID, to the point-to-point model. The airlines losing money during COVID and trying to save costs was the final nail in their coffin.
What they are finding out post-COVID is that, on some segments, the number of passengers grew more than the available slots. That, coupled with "sluggish" deliveries of other wide-body aircrafts, suddenly means that the capacity and economics of the A380 don't look that bad after all. To the point that some airlines are pushing for a re-engining, which would, despite the costs of running a 4-engine aircraft, be quite a game-changer. One of the issues with the A380 is that it came into service just at the time engine manufacturers made a generational leap in engine efficiency, making its economics worse than what they could be.
> They were put into storage with the understanding that it would be their final resting place, as the hub-and-spoke demand Airbus had anticipated lost, pre-COVID, to the point-to-point model.
Several of the words in this sentence are doing very heavy lifting.
The point-to-point model DID clearly and significantly win over the hub-and-spoke model for the majority of air traffic. But life is not a zero-sum game and becoming the dominant model does not magically mean that all other models promptly cease to exist, nor does it magically change the Earth's geography. It makes zero sense to claim all A380s were being parked forever because point-to-point won out when airlines like Emirates and Qantas are basically nothing but hub-and-spoke (and cannot really be anything else).
And that's besides the fact that words mean things. A plane being stored is not an "understanding" that that's its final resting place, it means exactly what it says: that it's being stored. If an airline really wanted to send a plane to its final resting place it would retire it, as e.g. Air France did with its A380s (and you'll notice that none of them have been "pulled out of storage", because there actually was no intention of bringing them back into service).
The 787 is an innovative aircraft, but its existence is a comedy of errors. It was never competition for the A380 though. The problem is that Boeing bit off more than they could chew when they tried to innovate in three areas: concept, design, and execution. They outsourced the latter two and provided insufficient oversight.
Concept: Lithium-ion batteries are great tech.
Design: Boeing outsourced the electrical system design work to Thales, and the first production airliner designed around lithium-ion batteries seemed like a great idea until they started catching fire.
Execution: Relying heavily on sub-contractors to build big chunks of the 787 was a great idea to save money, until the subs couldn't maintain the pace Boeing wanted for the price Boeing was willing to pay. So Boeing bought the South Carolina facility.
And Boeing keeps insisting on learning the hard way. Last year the FAA halted deliveries of the 787 for a few months due to quality issues.
The outsourcing and the SC facility are also motivated by Boeing’s decades-long war with its unions in Washington. Unfortunately for Boeing, the unionized workers in Renton and Everett were really good at their jobs compared to the workers in SC and at the subs, to the point that customers specifically demanded only to receive 787’s that were built in Everett.
I am not, in general, a pro-union guy, so I’m arguing against my natural bias here. But Boeing fucked up big time moving production out of Washington.
It seems like McDonnell Douglas thinks unions are the biggest threat to Boeing, not IP. Big parts of the 787 design did not require the ridiculous gantry crane to move and place.
I could see that the point of that was to be able to spin up new production sites effectively, and the main value in that was not building a million planes but leverage against the unions.
It's an impressive level of cognitive dissonance to describe union workers as more competent and customers demanding union-built planes because those planes are better built, and then still feel the need to throw in a "unions suck" comment.
Not at all. I don't think the union makes the Boeing workers in Washington more competent. It's the decades of experience and tribal knowledge that have been passed down in the Renton and Everett factories that make those workers more competent.
At any rate, I'm not trying to start an argument about unions. I only brought it up to underscore my point that despite completely sympathizing with their motivations, I still think Boeing's management made a mistake. It's not cognitive dissonance to have a nuanced view of the world and to acknowledge that there are real world exceptions to what I might otherwise believe based purely on my general biases. If that's difficult for you to understand, I am genuinely sorry for you.
You people really get triggered when someone casually states an opinion you disagree with, don’t you? Not taking the bait, sorry. The mere fact that you are so tedious and defensive about this point only makes me more determined not to be associated with your position.
You and Kenny are coming across as the type of people who see everything in simplistic black-and-white terms in which everything that ever goes wrong in the world, goes wrong because someone went against with your opinions which are Obviously Right And Impossible To Disagree With In Good Faith. That’s not how I see things and I am glad to make crystal clear that my criticism of Boeing’s decision is not rooted in any sort of unthinking pro-union tribalism, but rather in a considered appraisal of the situation in which I am willing to not only question but even reject the easy answers my own biases would otherwise lead me to.
There's this article about a Boeing quality manager that raised very similar safety and QA issues (and general culture issues) during the 787 development:
The 787 is fine. It's by far the most comfortable aircraft I've ever ridden, and the batteries-going-up-in-flames issue was short-lived and if I recall stemmed from some manufacturing deficiencies at the Japanese OEM (I am brainfarting their name).
That being said however, the kind of workmanship negligience we have reason to suspect of Boeing means absolutely no Boeing aircraft manufactured during the timeframe(s) concerned can be considered safe until inspections are done.
For now we don't have reason to suspect this extends beyond 737 MAX 9, but that could change drastically depending on what FAA finds.
> For now we don't have reason to suspect this extends beyond 737 MAX 9
Boeing in 2023 deferred 787 deliveries again because the manufacturing process was found to not have been properly followed. In the past they also found debris left on planes.
Maybe this issue specific to the MAX 9 but manufacturing issues at Boeing are not at all an isolated thing.
Ya, 787 quality issues have been publicized for a few years now, especially at the South Carolina facility. I also remember the DoD temporarily stopping deliveries of planes from Being due to quality, possibly last year or the year before.
While I'm a fan of airbus they're not perfect either. Consider the paint flaking issues at Qatar airlines. Even though airbus says this shouldn't be a safety issue, it is really a serious quality problem.
To add to the manufacturing issues, there are also other 787 issues to be concerned about. The lithium-ion debacle, for one. It's only by shear luck that the original design issues didn't end in fatalities. And the fix is.. ..meh.. The redesign of the lightening protection system to save costs is also something that has been overlooked until now.
I was under the impression it was quite nice and had partially eaten the lunch of Airbus' A380 by making longer flights with smaller plane economically advantageous.