"Charles Talleyrand" wrote

"Cub Driver" wrote
In the 1970s Boeing bet the company on the 747. Now Airbus is betting
the company on the Next Bigger Thing. Boeing has absolutely no
response to this.

There's this difference: Airbus is betting nothing. The launch aid and
below-market loans will be forgiven if the bet turns out to be bad.

Actually, Boeing's responce is "Airlines don't want big planes in big
numbers and anyone who tries this will lose money". (My paraphrase)

And they were right. The people who stand to lose money are European tax
payers. The business proposition made no sense if you were talking about
risking your_own_money.

"Cub Driver" wrote
That's interesting analysis. (I don't know anything about Airbus's
financial arrangements, other than to accept the Wall Street Journal's
statement that they are indeed subsidized by European governments.)

If correct, you are validating Boeing's decision to take the contest
elsewhere.

Boeing's situation is an interesting refutation of the current belief
that being the first mover is the most important thing. Airbus came
along and essentially duplicated Boeing's line, with the end result
that everything Airbus has is newer.

I suspect that Boeing will come out all right. In the first place,
nobody wants a situation in which there is only one airliner
manufacturer in the world (even if that mfgr is Boeing!). In the
second place, it has since the 1930s built wonderful airplanes. I feel
just a bit more secure flying a Boeing jet than I do the Airbus
variants (and that's what they are--variants).

_All_the Airbus models had their non-recurring engineering costs heavily and
directly subsidized by European tax payers. That's tough for Boeing to
compete with. In an interview (about 1990), Jean Pearson the (then) managing
director of AirbusIndustrie said that Boeing financed the development of the
B757 and B767 out of "the unconsciencable profits from the B747".

Europeans are of the opinion that because Boeing was paid for military
airframe work on things like the KC-135, B-52 and the proposal concepts for
the Boeing version of the C-5 that the designs of Boeing transports were
"subsidized" by the USG. In order to get a European airframer into the
transport business, the various host governments have paid AirbusIndustrie
hundreds of billions in direct launch aid through outright grants and
below-market loans.