I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands out in my memories:
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
French engineers were known for their willingness to embrace advanced, high-risk technologies to gain a decisive advantage in the aerospace market.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
That started before airbus. People forget that Aerospatiale (a founder of airbus) was a partner in Concord (aka Concorde). That is where cross-boarder aerospace really got started. Many saw such partnerships as key to keeping Europe together politically. Without Concorde-Airbus, europe might have looked very different.
Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.
I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
That level of sniping also means that groupthink can't happen, which is a major problem at Boeing: nobody wanted to speak up about obvious problems, and those that did saw their careers ended.
Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.
While there is some amount of sniping and banter everywhere whenever Americans and French will have different ways of expressing " this is 90% great" or "this is only 10% usable"
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
If we talk about the same „innovation“ offshoot, it happened right after I left the company. I think the cultural change that the top leadership at that time wanted to push was just too much to not cause a backlash. A new CTO who was perceived as an outsider, a somewhat implied message that the Silicon Valley’s way of working was superior to the company‘s traditional approach, and the internal realization that Airbus started to lag behind leading to the typical defensive behaviors. Curious how the culture evolved since then
Well they had a good run in 80s and 90s now they are massively behind competition and being kept alive by government payouts (to be fair much like France itself..)
I have met many former Airbus engineers and former Airbus contractors. Every single time I have heard nothing but bad things about the company.
Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace.
In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be a challenge.
Super sorry that these have been your experiences. Working for a very different company now, I again ended up in a highly international setting and - with good leadership - it can be incredibly enriching (the company is the result of several global mergers). Unfortunately, the way it works in many companies nowadays, the only situation where teams experience working with other countries are in settings that are imbalanced from the start (e.g., after offshoring)
This article is pushing its narrative so hard that it feels like the author's selection process was "I want to say something about Europe, which company would support my claims".
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
I would love to read an indepth article comparing how the US is whiffing EVs compared to China. Manufacturer attitudes, protectionism, government policies on vehicles and the background on renewable energy.
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.
20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.
386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.
561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.
1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.
Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).
It’d be fair to say it’s one of the few government-sponsored multinational companies that thrived. There was a time European governments pushed for strategic mergers to better compete against American companies.
The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.
My overall feeling is "did they take off, or did Boeing stumble?", but looking at that chart of deliveries it seems Airbus started taking off almost 25 years ago. So the recent struggles of Boeing would really be just the straw that broke the camel's back. My guess is Airbus will dominate for the next few decades.
I think this is about right. About a quarter-century ago, airbus finally became a manufacturer that could go head to head with the 737 and win more often than not. Since then they’ve generally gone from strength to strength while Boeing has been primarily concerned with financial engineering.
It is quite simple, they had the more recent cleansheet single aisle airframe design with enough ground clearance for modern high bypass engine designs. This has baked in a lot of inherent efficiencies including manufacturability meanwhile Boeing leadership refused to invest in a 737 replacement needed in the 2000s.
Don't forget the greatest stumble with the Bombardier CSeries.
I feel like if Boeing shut their mouth and bit their tongue at a little casual dumping they wouldn't have ended up with Airbus taking over the CS100 and adding yet another directly competitive aircraft into an "all Airbus" lineup that Boeing didn't have.
It's simply a company that operates in a rare industry where safety and reliability is more important than time to market or cost. Which makes risk-averse, hyper-conservative and consensus-seeking European culture at a relative advantage vs American "fake it till you make it" one.
Europe is quite conservative, in the sense that they would not invest billions into an unproven venture. It makes sense that it would excel at an industry that requires putting safety above everything.
The article says they did a lot of customer research and even lobbying, leading to fuel efficiency focus and reduced size, and sticking the finger up to various offended European countries (not taking delegates to US, eschewing RR engines). This seems like savvy being sustained over decades. It must be cultural.
IMHO Europe changed massively since the 80s and 90s in that regard, though.
Arianespace was pretty much SpaceX of the 80s and there were quite a few tech companies back then. Due to various reasons stagnation entirely took over Europe after the start of this millennium. Hard to say why. Certainly not putting all the blame on them (since Britain isn't doing that great either) but I don't think especially the Euro and the EU becoming much stronger helped.
I wouldn't say so confidently that Airbus is better than Boeing. Its just better than Boeing at THIS moment. They've been trading places over the decades. A company selling commercial airliners is really only as good as the order book for its latest aircraft. And a single stumble in developing a model can sink your orderbook for an entire decade or more.
Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.
Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.
There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.
Readit News
- While the French and Germans love to hate each other, they culturally complement each other very well. I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project (and yes, the UK and Spain are also part of Airbus but are much less visible)
- Despite being a highly political entity, you wouldn’t feel any of that day to day. Even up to the highest management levels, it felt like an engineering company focused on incredibly hard engineering challenges. Every once in a while, there was fighting over which country would get which work share for a new project, but it felt more like internal teams pushing their pet peeves rather than external political influence
- It was a truly international company. My first team had eight colleagues based in four countries. To make it all work, they had some very early video conferencing systems where the equipment would take up entire side rooms.
French influence drove Airbus's early focus on understanding customer needs and adapting to market requirements. Early on, the company adopted English as its working language and U.S. measurements to appeal to a wider range of airline customers.
German engineers brought a reputation for meticulous attention to detail, efficiency, and robust industrial processes, ensuring reliable and high-quality production.
Germany's strong engineering foundation provided the technical discipline needed to standardize components and organize the complex cross-border manufacturing process.
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I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.
The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.
This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.
It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).
The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."
Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it
Cf Arianespace.
Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace.
In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be a challenge.
It's quite hard to understand whether the author wants to focus on Airbus (in which case, the article spends way too much time comparing EU/US and talking about Boeing), Europe (in which case it's missing plenty of other companies/sectors) or industrial policy (why speak about Europe at all? Chinese companies are a much more recent example of succesful industrial policies).
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
It happens everywhere under every market system.
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
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Oh, come now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.
386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.
561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.
1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.
Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).
It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.
Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.
I feel like if Boeing shut their mouth and bit their tongue at a little casual dumping they wouldn't have ended up with Airbus taking over the CS100 and adding yet another directly competitive aircraft into an "all Airbus" lineup that Boeing didn't have.
After launching, then dropping, the A380. Perhaps they didn’t do enough customer interviews there.
Dead Comment
I mean, in this particular space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
Arianespace was pretty much SpaceX of the 80s and there were quite a few tech companies back then. Due to various reasons stagnation entirely took over Europe after the start of this millennium. Hard to say why. Certainly not putting all the blame on them (since Britain isn't doing that great either) but I don't think especially the Euro and the EU becoming much stronger helped.
Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.
Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.
There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.