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Which other companies, though? As of last year, Boeing and Airbus were 99% of the passenger plane market and 90% of the entire plane market [0]. Airbus is currently reeling from not just COVID-19 [1][3], but also a bribery scandal [2], and is in largely the same position as Boeing: Too big to fail, but nonetheless teetering on the edge. The analogy with the Bronze Age is very neat. The two writing systems which ruled in the Mediterranean were Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian/Babylonian cuneiform. Both were slow to use, difficult to spell, and non-phonetic. In contrast, the Phoenician-inspired scripts which popped up a few hundred years later were all phonetic, allowing people to more easily adopt them, and leading to Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. I'm not saying that planes will vanish. I'm suggesting, rather, that there may be a dramatic reduction, on the order of 99% or more, in the amount of air travel, and that this reduction may last for over a generation. During that time, we may see entirely new, less centralized techniques for achieving air travel, which could not possibly have happened as long as Boeing and Airbus are still dominant. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/why-the-airbus-boeing-compan... [1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-airbus/... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-probe-idUSKBN1ZX2M... [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-crisis-pushes-air... |
