ARE BOEING'S DIFFICULTIES MAKING AIRBUS HAPPY?

February 18, 2024

The U.S. aircraft manufacturing giant is going through very serious difficulties. Boeing is having a hard time recovering from its unfortunate competition with Airbus for medium-haul aircraft, in other words, the B737 class on the one hand against the European manufacturer's A320s. It should be noted, however, that the American manufacturer has been looking a bit into what happened to it.

Over the course of the mergers and acquisitions of its American competitors: Lockheed and McDonnel Douglas for civil aircraft and Rockwell International, among others, for the military and space part, Boeing had become an undeniable monument of aircraft manufacturing ranging from the best range of civil aircraft from the excellent short-haul B737 to the essential B777 for long-haul to the manufacture of aerospace shuttles:? Columbia, Enterprise, Discovery, Challenger, Atlantis, Endeavour or Pathfinder, not to mention the entire range of military aircraft. In short, everything was going well until Airbus, well inspired, developed its A 320 Neo range, including in particular the A321 Neo in its medium/long-haul versions. Orders poured in from the European manufacturer at a time when Boeing did not have a competitive aircraft. It was then that, for strictly economic reasons, a modified version of the B737 was created as a matter of urgency without taking into account all the precautions related to safety. This is unforgiving and 2 fatal crashes have hit Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines. Since these were supposedly exotic carriers, Boeing made the grave mistake of taking the matter with a certain arrogance, going so far as to accuse the carriers in question of shortcomings in their organization.

This was without counting on the bodies in charge of air transport safety who discovered large compromises between the authorities in charge of marketing authorisations and the manufacturer. Thus, the entire program of the last B737 MAX had to be revised, which led not only to considerable economic losses, it should be remembered that an aircraft is only paid for when it is delivered to its customer, but to a huge deterioration of Boeing's image.

And now we started to discover a number of defects in the production chain, which, like Airbus, is made up of an infinite number of subcontractors. Luckily, despite very serious errors in quality control, there were no casualties. The fact remains that the primary quality of air transport, safety, has been largely undermined. Not only has Boeing's image been largely damaged, but potential customers are getting impatient because the production lines are no longer releasing the aircraft in accordance with the order book.

So can this situation benefit its European competitor Airbus? The latter is in the lead, at least when it comes to aircraft orders. At the end of 2023, Airbus' order book was approaching 9000 aircraft compared to only 6000 for Boeing. One might have expected that Chinese or Russian manufacturers would benefit from a postponement of orders, but this is not the case and this situation will continue as long as the Comac or MC 21 do not have a global maintenance network and this is not for tomorrow.

However, is this situation so favourable to Airbus? Its order book represents more than 10 years of production, provided that new orders do not add to it. This is what has been happening since the beginning of 2024. Hardly a week goes by without new orders being added to the huge quantity of machines to be delivered. As Airbus' aircraft are built according to the same schemes as Boeing's, i.e. distributed among dozens of subcontractors, it only takes one of them to fail for the entire assembly line to be impacted. So how will Airbus be able to cope with this tide of orders in the form of disappointing its customers?

Of course, we can rejoice in the current success of the European manufacturer, but we must be careful not to avoid a certain arrogance like the one that led Boeing into the difficulties from which it will eventually emerge.

Let's keep in mind that a commercial aircraft is an extremely complex machine that must be completely reliable. It is not easy and it must lead all those involved in air transport to great humility to make this wonderful activity work flawlessly.