[ColFrancis]

The idea is that if it's small enough to fail, then the incentives are much stronger to avoid failure. If it's too big to fail, why would they put effort into avoiding failure? So yes, buying from a small enough to fail company could be seen as safer.

Note that too big to fail, and small enough to fail has less to do with the size of the company and more to do with market position and government perception.

[break_the_bank]

Playing devils advocate. I’m guessing long term maintenance would be a concern when ones buying something as expensive as a plane. How do you trust a new small company with this?

[ColFrancis]

Yes, it would. But right now the long term maintenance of the A380 is shaky despite Airbus still being around. Devils advocate to long term maintenance with a large company: they could just stop caring about you as a customer or refuse to support you.

It's a difficult space to make decisions in and I think it's difficult to make any broad statements about reliability of product or company. Someone would need to actually run some numbers.

[asdff]

Maybe they'd put effort into avoiding failure if we held decision makers liable for negligence when appropriate, rather than shielding them with the entire company employing thousands.