Clumsy Euro-bashing – Moon of Alabama

April 9, 2008

Clumsy Euro-bashing

Seven month ago some Forbes scribes wrote a piece headlined Airbus’ A380: Millstone, Not ‘Milestone’

Delivery delays for the A380 started to pile up in mid-2005, as Airbus blamed wiring installation problems. Skeptical commentators, however, pointed to larger design issues like weight. Customers, including Qantas and Emirates, saw the delivery date slip from six months behind schedule to a year-and-a-half.

Worse, EADS’ clumsy Franco-German dual management structure mishandled the entire situation, only announcing the full extent of the delays in June 2006.

Now I am waiting for that dude’s comment on this:

April 9 (Bloomberg) — Boeing Co., the world’s second- largest commercial aircraft maker, delayed delivery of the 787 Dreamliner until the third quarter of 2009, the third time in six months the aircraft has been postponed.

The revised delivery target, announced by Chicago-based Boeing today in a statement, puts the Dreamliner at least 14 months behind its original schedule of May 2008.

Will it include a sniding remark about "Boeing’s clumsy American management structure"?

Posted by b on April 9, 2008 at 13:40 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Would this happen to have anything to do with the US defense contract for tanker aircraft recently rewarded to Airbus?

Posted by: ralphieboy | Apr 9 2008 14:30 utc | 1

Would this happen to have anything to do with the US defense contract for tanker aircraft recently rewarded to Airbus?
Yep – the Pentagon had reasons to doubt that Boeing can develop the tanker on time. The Airbus tanker is developed and flying.

Posted by: b | Apr 9 2008 14:34 utc | 2

You’d think a company like Boeing would have the political clout to name its prices and terms of business. Must be a case of clumsy military-industrial management.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Apr 9 2008 17:07 utc | 3

I would guess that Boeing is arrogant and fat and indeed too dependent on military sales. they were able to push the B-2 through at over 2 billion apiece.
they were living high on the hog for a long time and made buckets of money. then they got caught bribing the contracting official in the Air Force and lost a huge contract that was pure profit and pork.
competing in the commercial market against AirBus with its own state sponsorship is not something Boeing is used to doing. I have a sister that lives in Seattle and have seen the huge Boeing factory and know that many people work for them and indeed the Seattle economy is greatly affected by good times and bad times that Boeing has. For their sake I hope that this particular airplane builder can continue to make good jets, they have much to be proud of…everyone was in awe of the 747.

Posted by: dan of steele | Apr 9 2008 19:09 utc | 4

too close for comfort

Posted by: beq | Apr 9 2008 19:28 utc | 5

“…I would guess that Boeing is arrogant and fat and indeed too dependent on military sales. they were able to push the B-2 through at over 2 billion apiece…”

Dan, Boeing wasn’t involved in the B2 program. The prime contractor was Grumman Northrop for the aircraft which was finally produced. Northrop had pioneered the development of the flying wing back in the 1930s and 1940s, including a jet-engine powered flying wing which actually penetrated USAF air base space because of the natural stealthiness of the design. So, Northrop was a natural prime contractor when the USAF went looking for low visibility strategic bomber.
I would imagine that Boeing’s continuing problems with its Dreamliner (maybe they should rename it the Nightmareliner) contributed tangentially to Boeing’s inability to respond to the USAF’s tanker program as it evolved. I suspect every available resource was being committed to fixing the Dreamliner program in a timely fashion, which meant Boeing had nothing left to give in developing a new proposal for the USAF. Boeing’s management decided to risk losing the USAF contract because they valued the profitability of the Dreamliner program more than the USAF tanker project.

Posted by: PrahaPartizan | Apr 10 2008 3:28 utc | 6

There is still plenty of scope for snarky comments about the 787 delays as its largely a Japanese aircraft. Not many people realise this but the 787 is at least a 35% Japanese and alot more than that in dollar terms. Even the wings and wingbox are made in Japan which is just amazing as the technology required to make these used to be an absolutely crucial Boeing company secret. Put another way, Japan could make the 787 without Boeing, but Boeing could not build a 787 without Japan.
The launch customer for the 787 was All Nippon Airways and if you look at the very successful sales history for the 787 you see that a riduculous number of them are to various Japanese airlines. The 787 is a very advanced aircraft using mostly composites (eg carbon fibre). It would have been very difficult for Boeing by itself to secure sales for such a risky project. Looked at differently you could say that Japan Inc. decided that it wanted to move into the business of manufacturing composite commercial aircraft and decided to hire Boeing to do marketing.
Its a typical modern day American manufacturing product. Asia provides the financing, engineering, design, actually builds the thing and controls all the key technologies while America provides “project management”, marketing, US legal certification and “final assembly”. Actually I’m being unfair in saying that. Its not quite that bad.

Posted by: swio | Apr 10 2008 5:55 utc | 7

In other words, Boeing is doing with Japan what Germany and France are doing with Airbus manufacturing…

Posted by: ralphieboy | Apr 10 2008 9:10 utc | 8

swio is on the money.
talking to some of the people who work at boeing, the 787 program is trying to do a couple of big very things at once – large-scale use of advanced composites and large-scale offshore production – and failing at both. the union guys say it’s more the offshoring and inability to communicate engineering solutions to overseas suppliers/partners. boeing management has becoming accustomed to having egg on the face these days.

Posted by: served_cold | Apr 10 2008 18:10 utc | 9

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