> Several defence analysts point out that although the KC-46 is the standard tanker of the USAF, it has suffered technical problems and delays that have slowed its competitiveness abroad, to the benefit of the A330 MRTT, which has already been adopted by many NATO and non-NATO allies. In this sense, the Italian choice is seen more as an industrial victory for Airbus than as an American “political defeat”.
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.
Having doors flying off one of your planes and engine failure causing part of the cowling to bust a window and sucking a passenger out of another is definitely not a bit of politics. Nevermind the bullshit 737Max nonsense. At this point, I'd imagine any Boeing orders left are only in place because Airbus can't keep up. Politics didn't need to come within 10 miles of this decision. It's just the free cherry on top.
The engine that failed on the Southwest flight was a CFM International CFM56, which has also been used on multiple Airbus planes including the A320. The engine itself as well as the containment mechanism that’s supposed to prevent this kind of situation were the responsibility of CFM and had nothing to do with Boeing. This could just as easily have happened on an A320.
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.
If we're stringing random facts together to try and make a point, Airbus was found guilty two days ago of manslaughter in the 2009 Air France crash that fell into the ocean.
Incidents that are over five years old have minimal impact in terms of current competition between Boing and Airbus.
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.
Yeah - the mass casualties with regards to Max, changed things a lot. Boeing used to be about enginering; that quality dropped indeed decades ago. Not sure why or how.
> Having doors flying off one of your planes (…) definitely not a bit of politics.
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.
No, majority of Boeing orders to foreign countries use USA backed loans or is a significant part of pushing US interests in the world.
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.
Yes, but the decline of Boeing also imo demonstrates relentless American short-term-ism. Gutting the engineering side of the company, optimizing to avoid testing a new plane model (the 737 Max debacle) and so-forth is very characteristic of America today.
Meanwhile Switzerland is being taken to the cleaners. F35s that had a fix cost in contract with Lockheed are no longer fixed cost because the US says so.
Patriot systen permanently delayed and price going up and up. Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...
> 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).
It’s not just Europeans who are beginning to realize that the U.S. can’t be trusted; Australians are still waiting for a hypothetical delivery date for their AUKUS submarines.
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.
I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder. They are losing the European market just as the largest rearmament since ww2 happens.
Maybe they are and its just a lost cause with the US administration.
Foreign Military Sales from USA all go under a very ugly kind of contract where you could argue you're not sure of delivery until after the gear was decommissioned and turned into razor blades. You can't (officially) negotiate it, you can't demand accountability on actual deliveries, the real delivery time is "whenever we get to it", and so on.
It's just that until recently USA at least pretended to care to not use those provisions too much.
The US stock market is a lag indicator. It is built on perception and whim but, ultimately, is forced to deal with reality. Stories like this don't shift the market, and economies, overnight but they are showing what should be decades of economic and political shift happening relatively in just a few years. In the end this isn't just a signal that Europe has lost faith in the current administration, it is pretty clear that happened a while ago, this is a sign that Europe and others have lost faith in future US administrations. Everyone is a looser here in the long run for many reasons. We really did have it all.
They probably also didn't want a President Vance, Rubio, Junior or Ivanka, to use the availability of parts and tech support as a way to ensure their compliance..
This is a noob question but wondering if anyone here could answer.
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?
Industrially boeing / airbus are 100k large companies, i.e. need 300m+ base country size (or in EU case, block size) to support specialized workforce large enough for modern commercial aviation. Economically, fuel costs, i.e. engine maturity makes any entrant that's doesn't have parity engine core tech automatically none viable because simply higher costs due to lifetime fuel costs. (Geo)politically, there's lots of certification / safety drama that incumbents like US/EU will throw to undermine competitors so really also matter of geopolitical power - i.e. apart from engines, PRC COMAC using western components mostly for easier certification, they have large enough internal market to sustain development against economics. Almost no one else has those conditions, except India but they don't have industrial base.
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.
> Economically, fuel costs, i.e. engine maturity makes any entrant that's doesn't have parity engine core tech automatically none viable because simply higher costs due to lifetime fuel costs.
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.
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.
Indeed. Embraer (Brazil) does jetliners carrying up to around 150 pax. So did Bombardier (Canada), though they sold their C-Series to Airbus (now the Airbus A220). Then there's COMAC (China) and UAC (Russia; also a conglomerate of Sukhoi, Tupolev, etc.).
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.
These two choices are conglomerates of what used to be a much larger set of manufacturers
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.
Cost and complexity of certification? At least that was why Mitsubishi MRJ never went into production. They got the first prototype flying in 6 years, then sought to obtain certification for subsequent 9 years through various means before giving up and scrapping all ~10 examples. Kawasaki P-1 that flew in the overlapping timeframe is in production and in service, with IHI made indigenous engines albeit with teething issues, so it's not like planes and engines can't be made by anyone other than existing players. They just can't be sold, and therefore can't be* done.
You're not missing anything. It was just a dumb picture of Trump's face looming over an unsuspecting Greenlandic town. Ominous but nothing with any news value
"Normally he was wont to be about twelve feet from nose to tail, but when he was very depressed, Trump's AI likeness could be anything up to eight hundred yards long."
As long as a mad king is ruling over the USA, no US product or service should taint european markets. I fail to see why money should go into companies that are hostile to europeans. Canadians already made that decision months ago (granted, due to the tight coupling of their own market to the USA, this is mega-difficult; most Canadians live on the southern area, aka close to the USA - realistically Canadians can only reduce dependencies, but will never be able to decouple completely, but they had those discussions before, in particular with regards to security. Why invest into a country that became hostile to other countries? Makes indeed no sense. The USA burned all bridges here.)
> Several defence analysts point out that although the KC-46 is the standard tanker of the USAF, it has suffered technical problems and delays that have slowed its competitiveness abroad, to the benefit of the A330 MRTT, which has already been adopted by many NATO and non-NATO allies. In this sense, the Italian choice is seen more as an industrial victory for Airbus than as an American “political defeat”.
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.
Having doors flying off one of your planes and engine failure causing part of the cowling to bust a window and sucking a passenger out of another is definitely not a bit of politics. Nevermind the bullshit 737Max nonsense. At this point, I'd imagine any Boeing orders left are only in place because Airbus can't keep up. Politics didn't need to come within 10 miles of this decision. It's just the free cherry on top.
The engine that failed on the Southwest flight was a CFM International CFM56, which has also been used on multiple Airbus planes including the A320. The engine itself as well as the containment mechanism that’s supposed to prevent this kind of situation were the responsibility of CFM and had nothing to do with Boeing. This could just as easily have happened on an A320.
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.
5 replies →
If we're stringing random facts together to try and make a point, Airbus was found guilty two days ago of manslaughter in the 2009 Air France crash that fell into the ocean.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o
It's the same airplane as the MRTT, A330.
7 replies →
Incidents that are over five years old have minimal impact in terms of current competition between Boing and Airbus.
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.
7 replies →
Yeah - the mass casualties with regards to Max, changed things a lot. Boeing used to be about enginering; that quality dropped indeed decades ago. Not sure why or how.
3 replies →
> Having doors flying off one of your planes (…) definitely not a bit of politics.
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.
No, majority of Boeing orders to foreign countries use USA backed loans or is a significant part of pushing US interests in the world.
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.
The Boeing issues started 20 to 25 years ago, it just take a long time to become this bad.
Yes, but the decline of Boeing also imo demonstrates relentless American short-term-ism. Gutting the engineering side of the company, optimizing to avoid testing a new plane model (the 737 Max debacle) and so-forth is very characteristic of America today.
Meanwhile Switzerland is being taken to the cleaners. F35s that had a fix cost in contract with Lockheed are no longer fixed cost because the US says so.
Patriot systen permanently delayed and price going up and up. Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...
> 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).
It’s not just Europeans who are beginning to realize that the U.S. can’t be trusted; Australians are still waiting for a hypothetical delivery date for their AUKUS submarines.
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.
I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder. They are losing the European market just as the largest rearmament since ww2 happens.
Maybe they are and its just a lost cause with the US administration.
38 replies →
Foreign Military Sales from USA all go under a very ugly kind of contract where you could argue you're not sure of delivery until after the gear was decommissioned and turned into razor blades. You can't (officially) negotiate it, you can't demand accountability on actual deliveries, the real delivery time is "whenever we get to it", and so on.
It's just that until recently USA at least pretended to care to not use those provisions too much.
The US stock market is a lag indicator. It is built on perception and whim but, ultimately, is forced to deal with reality. Stories like this don't shift the market, and economies, overnight but they are showing what should be decades of economic and political shift happening relatively in just a few years. In the end this isn't just a signal that Europe has lost faith in the current administration, it is pretty clear that happened a while ago, this is a sign that Europe and others have lost faith in future US administrations. Everyone is a looser here in the long run for many reasons. We really did have it all.
The USAF also selected the MRTT but corruption took care of that threat to Boeing.
I am surprised that USAF selecting MRTT even got so far as to be made public. I would expect it would die in some draft document on someones office PC
It’s good for propaganda.
> The tanker deal is not just a competition won; it is a decision that shifts the balance.
Did they at least use European AI to edit this?
Italy probably didn’t want to wait 12 years for delivery. Good choice.
They probably also didn't want a President Vance, Rubio, Junior or Ivanka, to use the availability of parts and tech support as a way to ensure their compliance..
Italy is a big supplier for the F-35 and other major US programs, so that knife cuts both ways. I don’t think that was a consideration at all.
1 reply →
This is a noob question but wondering if anyone here could answer.
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?
Industrially boeing / airbus are 100k large companies, i.e. need 300m+ base country size (or in EU case, block size) to support specialized workforce large enough for modern commercial aviation. Economically, fuel costs, i.e. engine maturity makes any entrant that's doesn't have parity engine core tech automatically none viable because simply higher costs due to lifetime fuel costs. (Geo)politically, there's lots of certification / safety drama that incumbents like US/EU will throw to undermine competitors so really also matter of geopolitical power - i.e. apart from engines, PRC COMAC using western components mostly for easier certification, they have large enough internal market to sustain development against economics. Almost no one else has those conditions, except India but they don't have industrial base.
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.
> Economically, fuel costs, i.e. engine maturity makes any entrant that's doesn't have parity engine core tech automatically none viable because simply higher costs due to lifetime fuel costs.
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.
4 replies →
There are really only 2 choices.
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.
Indeed. Embraer (Brazil) does jetliners carrying up to around 150 pax. So did Bombardier (Canada), though they sold their C-Series to Airbus (now the Airbus A220). Then there's COMAC (China) and UAC (Russia; also a conglomerate of Sukhoi, Tupolev, etc.).
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.
>There are really only 2 choices.
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.
1 reply →
These two choices are conglomerates of what used to be a much larger set of manufacturers
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.
3 replies →
Cost and complexity of certification? At least that was why Mitsubishi MRJ never went into production. They got the first prototype flying in 6 years, then sought to obtain certification for subsequent 9 years through various means before giving up and scrapping all ~10 examples. Kawasaki P-1 that flew in the overlapping timeframe is in production and in service, with IHI made indigenous engines albeit with teething issues, so it's not like planes and engines can't be made by anyone other than existing players. They just can't be sold, and therefore can't be* done.
The Chinese government has spent 18 years and an unknown amount of funds trying to compete:
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.
There's probably going to be ongoing attempts to be less reliant on the US while Trump is going on about needing Greenland and the like.
His last odd 'truth' about it was six hours ago https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1166240468099...
"Truth Social is currently unavailable in your area"
Pity, in Hong Kong I cannot read the wise words of the king.
You're not missing anything. It was just a dumb picture of Trump's face looming over an unsuspecting Greenlandic town. Ominous but nothing with any news value
[dead]
"Normally he was wont to be about twelve feet from nose to tail, but when he was very depressed, Trump's AI likeness could be anything up to eight hundred yards long."
Good? A bit of competition is good for everybody. Having one vendor for everything leads to many problems.
As long as a mad king is ruling over the USA, no US product or service should taint european markets. I fail to see why money should go into companies that are hostile to europeans. Canadians already made that decision months ago (granted, due to the tight coupling of their own market to the USA, this is mega-difficult; most Canadians live on the southern area, aka close to the USA - realistically Canadians can only reduce dependencies, but will never be able to decouple completely, but they had those discussions before, in particular with regards to security. Why invest into a country that became hostile to other countries? Makes indeed no sense. The USA burned all bridges here.)
Mad king gone + plausible reforms done that preclude another mad king. That's going to take a while.
[dead]
[flagged]
The world is moving on from America the damage being done by the worst administration in the history of the country just continues on.
Everyday, a new low…
[flagged]
The text looks AI generated as well.