Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner

https://simpleflying.com/airbus-a320-overtake-boeing-737-most-delivered-commercial-airliner/

by helsinkiandrew • 11 months ago

103 73 11 months ago

Complacency - particularly a sense of you being on top in the natural order of things - will kill you, one way or another. No empire has ever survived it from the Romans to, the British empire to, well, I guess Boeing. Business textbooks are rammed with stories of complacency gutting market-dominating corporates (IBM, Kodak, Xerox), and the big reckoning seems to be coming for the likes of Boeing, GM, Ford, and many more. In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there.

The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start.

When you're not totally absorbed by the share price, and instead you're trying to build a sustainable long-term business that can pay off decades (or generations), later, you get to make decisions that lead to a more sustainable and trusted business.

themafia2• 11 months ago

Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.

FirmwareBurner3• 11 months ago

Monopolies will kill you.

So when is it gonna kill Google?

pjjpo• 11 months ago

Looking at their general stock performance, I'd say it's actually only the customers being killed.

Agree with the sentiments of the sibling posts that monopolies seem as great for business as ever.

PedroBatista• 11 months ago

Boeing is going nowhere. One of the reasons Boeing’s bad behavior in last couple decades is also the reason they won’t die: The US Government

tempodox• 11 months ago

Monopolies will kill you.

But sadly not fast enough. The monopolies get to make everyone else miserable for far too long.

g9yuayon• 11 months ago

And the competition from Airbus may not make Boeing better either. On the contrary, Boeing may well get into a death spiral and a slow but painful death. What competition really means is that incumbents can die without impacting customers as other more competent alternatives will fill the void.

MaKey• 11 months ago

Another recent example is Intel.

scrlk• 11 months ago

Ironic, given that Andy Grove's motto was "Only the paranoid survive".

There's a Chinese saying: "Wealth does not pass three generations". Three generations of Intel CEOs after Grove: Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini and Brian Krzanich (the progenitor of much of the mess that Intel is in today).

dude250711• 11 months ago

In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there.

Surely, Google here is the cautionary tale? Though I guess it started with the cloud for them.

Pavilion2095• 11 months ago

The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start.

But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. If anything, they abandoned the idea of a new design and introduced 737 MAX as a response to the competition - A320neo.

Gravityloss2• 11 months ago

I guess that's also a natural evolution of many industries and societies, which has happened many times.

First you have rapid iteration and lots of innovation.

Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer.

Then it gets so bad you won't have anyone working anymore who has finished any new projects during their career, everybody's been working on the same decades long projects since time immemorial. Some new ones are started, some are cancelled every now and then but none are finished.

Then the organization will not even try anymore and accept to live in the ruins created by past generations.

Then it could happen that all artifacts crumble, all documentation disappears and even the people propagating the intergenerational verbal history forget or die and nobody will even know that anything existed.

kamaal• 11 months ago

>But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years.

Most of Boeing's Ls seem to have come from quality issues, and that seems to come downstream to cutting spending on engineering, testing and in general overall technical ecosystem.

There is no point in making 20 or even 200 new planes, if you don't make them well.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs

duke_sam• 11 months ago

It’s impressive that Airbus caught up with Boeing after a 20 year head start. It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid off but the article reads more like a PR piece than a case for why the A320 out competed the 737.

Tuna-Fish2• 11 months ago

A320 and the 737 were designed in entirely different worlds.

The 737 was designed using light tables and slide rules, to use low-bypass turbofans and direct controls with avionics only on board to optionally aid the pilots.

The A320 was designed in CAD and using CFD, with full digital fly-by-wire, and designed from the start for high-bypass turbofans.

Both designs have been updated plenty since, but because the basic design is much more modern, the A320 is much more amenable to being updated. There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737.

The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.

kortilla• 11 months ago

The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.

What’s wrong with the 737 design that it wouldn’t pass today as a new aircraft? (Ignoring the disaster that was the MAX.)

rob743• 11 months ago

There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737.

Not only that, but Boeing is actually limited in how much they can "modernize" the 737, because doing too much might exceed the limits of the 737's type certificate. This is the reason behind the current engine inlet overheating worries, which has led to an airworthiness directive for the 737 MAX (https://aerospacenews.com/faa-airworthiness-directive_boeing...) and is also one of the reasons for the delay certifying the MAX 7 and MAX 10. This would be a complete non-issue for other planes, because all modern designs have a switch position that only turns on the engine anti-ice system when it's needed, but the 737 MAX can't have that because the 1967 737 didn't.

rob743• 11 months ago

Yeah, that was exactly my feeling too when I read that Airbus has "finally" caught up to Boeing. With that head start, catching up was not something that could have been expected (unless Boeing would have replaced the 737, which they arguably should have done years ago already, but that's a different story). Of course, if you look into the details, things get more complicated, since the 737 had an in-house narrowbody competitor with the 757 for some time - but Airbus now has the same, with the A220 competing with the smaller A320 family models (A318 and A319).

rsynnott8• 11 months ago

Was the 757 _really_ meaningfully a 737 competitor? I've only ever seen them used for fairly long-haul flights; didn't think there was much role crossover.

(Was on a transatlantic one once. Never again.)

jhoechtl3• 11 months ago

It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid of

Well they did bet on the Dreamliner, fell on their nose and still recovered.

rsynnott8• 11 months ago

Dreamliner is the Boeing 787. Are you thinking of the A380 superjumbo?

Someone• 11 months ago

Boeing had a 20 year head start, but in a rapidly growing market that doesn’t count as much as in a stable one. FTA:

“By 1988, when Airbus launched its new A320 narrowbody jet, Boeing had already established a strong lead, having delivered around 1,500 of its popular jets”

So, Boeing sold about 1,500 767s in the first 20 years and over 10,500 in the < 40 years since. Airbus sold about 12,000 in the < 40 years since.

So, to catch up, Airbus produced about 15% more than Boeing did.

mojuba• 11 months ago

Makes it even more impressive considering that the A320 is slightly more expensive.

jraby3• 11 months ago

Pricing on these planes is pretty complex. It's a stretch to say that airbus is unequivocally more expensive without comparing various options.

Source: my brother worked for Boeing in sales and has been in the industry 30 years.

bobthepanda• 11 months ago

Yeah, also nobody pays list price.

rsynnott8• 11 months ago

Indeed, but the practical result in this case is that the A320 is _much_ more expensive, because demand is far higher. Ryanair's big purchase of 737 MAX-10s a while back was at, at most, 50% of list price; that degree of discount isn't really happening for the A32x at the moment, I don't think.

jaggs• 11 months ago

In my country we have a saying - "Every dog has its day".

Gareth3212• 11 months ago

It has been kind of shocking to see Boeing's decline in real time like this. My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority. Reading articles from current and former employees, it sounds like the decline actually began decades ago. It took this long to raid the coffers, so to speak, of talent, good will, and QA redundancy. It is suggested that they are too big to fail, but it will be expensive to re-pad all that redundancy, and I'm not sure subsequent leaders will be willing to lose the next decade of profit in pursuit of regaining their engineering credentials. I think the true cost of this has not yet been realised in their stock price.

rsynnott8• 11 months ago

My whole life I saw them as an unshakable example of U.S. engineering superiority.

I mean realistically in this particular category (narrow-bodies) they've essentially been playing catchup for the last _40 years_; ever since it was released they've really had trouble competing with the A320. Their inability to do basically anything right feels newer, but the 737 has long been a weak spot.

SR2Z2• 11 months ago

The main problem with the 737 is really just that it's old, and at every single turn Boeing has chosen to make incremental updates instead of redesigning it.

An issue like MCAS would be much less likely if the aircraft was designed to be fully fly-by-wire - but a fully fly-by-wire single-aisle would have to be recertified from scratch.

The problem with jetliner manufacturing is that you kind of have to bet the company on every single new model you release, just because the process of designing a new plane is so cumbersome and difficult that you can't really afford to be doing it very often.

h4kunamata• 11 months ago

Poised??

Only if a company is completely blind to buy Boeing planes in 2025! It does not matter if the places are millions of dollars cheaper, all the money spent with lawsuits and lawyers when things go sideways, plus the airline name dragged to shit, I don't think it is worth.

closewith3• 11 months ago

The airline with the best safety record in the world, Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet (with the exception of the Lauda Airbus A320-200s) that has never had a fatal accident, despite over a 120 Boeing 737 MAX-8s currently operating.

hshdhdhj4444• 11 months ago

It’s probably easy to find a subset of airlines that would work for either airline.

But that RyanAir didn’t happen to have a version of the design that was extremely unsafe doesn’t mean that the family of planes is safer than the competition. It just means that it got lucky that it didn’t have the flawed planes.

helsinkiandrew• 11 months ago

Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet

That's probably the biggest reason for their safety record: the same plane means common maintenance, training and operations, giving much less risk.

SR2Z2• 11 months ago

I fly on 737 MAXes pretty often. They're still modern aircraft, and they still have a good safety record overall (consider that almost 2000 have been produced, and there have only been two crashes). Boeing will keep pumping them out and they will go on to be just as reliable as any other modern jetliner.

The flying public generally does not know or care what the model of plane they're on is. I almost never see anyone actually pull out the safety card from the seatback pocket to check. I'm not sure if it can be a reputational risk.

pxndxx• 11 months ago

Vueling, the largest airline in Spain is actually shifting from the 320 to an all Boeing 737 MAX fleet in the coming years. I was really sad to hear that given it's size and presence in Europe.

octo8882• 11 months ago

As if we needed another reason not to fly Vueling...!

rsynnott8• 11 months ago

I mean as budget airlines go, they're actually not at all bad. I recently went to Barcelona on Vueling and returned on Ryanair (due to flight timings), and I was easily twice as irritated by the flight back vs the flight out.

(They do, however, use Dublin airport's worst 'gate', 335, which is _actually_ a bus to a small fake terminal separate from any of the main ones.)

rob743• 11 months ago

Eurowings (Lufthansa's low cost carrier) has also ordered 40 737 MAX (or rather has been "allocated" a probably pre-existing order): https://newscloud.eurowings.com/en/eurowings-sets-sights-on-... Notwithstanding the marketing BS, I wonder what the real reason behind this decision is - probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog, a "sweet" deal with Boeing, cozying up to Trump, and some other considerations that I can't think of right now?

EDIT: after researching a bit more, it looks like the initial order was from 2023 (https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-40-boeing-737-max-40-airb...), so "cozying up to Trump" was probably not a factor at the time. Also, I imagine that order being passed around like the proverbial hot potato between all the airlines in Lufthansa group, until it finally landed in Eurowings' lap: "Interested in some brand new state of the art 737 MAXes? No? Why? What do you mean, `You take them if you're so fond of them`? We would, gladly, but we have an all-A320 fleet and would like to keep it that way. Oh, you too, really?".

rsynnott8• 11 months ago

probably a combination between the length of Airbus's delivery backlog

It's likely this. Airbus has a backlog of ~7500 A32x orders right now, and produces about 75 a month, so if you order one today, you're looking at eight years.

Though also some budget airlines like the 737 because it's _short_; it's not as high off the ground as an A320, making access via airstairs more feasible.

egeres• 11 months ago

This decision was actually made at IAG (International Airlines Group) which is the parent company of Vueling, British Airways, Iberia etc... not Vueling per se. The main motivation behind it is the price drop on the 737 MAX line. I'm surprised that switching to Boeing it's even worth it considering given these companies mostly fly Airbus planes so their pilots, supply chains for maintenance etc will need an overhaul

dahcryn2• 11 months ago

most low cost airlines are on 737 actually. I guess the strategy for Vuelling is definitely to go more after ryanair and other holiday carriers.

Some MBA types might also see the opportunity to lay off experienced expensive Airbus pilots and hire new cheaper Boeing pilots, classic strategic gambling, not sure those things ever pay off.

rsynnott8• 11 months ago

I think their fleet is largely fairly old; if they were to order a320s _now_ they could be waiting a decade (there's a horrendous backlog), so realistically they may not have much choice.

targadany2• 11 months ago

Good, Airbus deserves it. Boeing management prioritised stock price by aggressively cutting costs, outsourcing critical work, and pressuring engineers into a compromising safety culture, and quality control. Dennis Muilenburg is mostly to blame them gave himself over $90 million in compensation and severance. I assume Airbus knows this behaviour is bad?

buyucu2• 11 months ago

Not surprising, no? Boeing has killed so many people, and had so many near-misses recently that there is no way I'm flying in a Boeing plane these days.

Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner

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