The delivery date of an airplane and it's flight schedule are two completely different things.
The delivery date is an estimate and the date can shift until the plane is safe to fly. The deadline for delivery is not a true deadline and the factory will only work to its safe production limit to deliver the plane.
A bad practice would be to just put the plane out on the tarmac, regardless of state.
It works to the safe productivity limit of the factory, not the arbitrary demand of the customer.
Customer’s demands are rarely arbitrary. Time is money and there are typically many moving parts to any corporate strategy.
For example, if the customer’s plane isn’t delivered on the agreed upon date, you now have pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, etc. that need to be paid for no work, or let go and new hires made / trained at a later date, which is expensive. It’s also lost revenue and market opportunity.
There’s also the potential that the customer cancels their order and buys a different plane from a different manufacturer.
Agreed you can’t put out a plane that’s not safe, but you can pay overtime, or shift resources between projects, etc., to produce a safe plane and try to deliver on time and limit the above negative effects on the customer.
In general, if you ask someone when they want something done by, they usually say “as soon as possible”, not because it’s arbitrary but because there’s typically real world value in completing a task / gaining access to an asset sooner rather than later.
Oh dear, do you have any idea what, say, Emirates will do to Boeing and Airbus if the promised delivery date is missed? And how airplanes are built and delivered? Hint, delivery dates are not estimates and proposals that might be met, or maybe wont.
And what makes you think planes don't have to safe for flight, with controls and sign offs, before take of?
> Oh dear, do you have any idea what, say, Emirates will do to Boeing and Airbus if the promised delivery date is missed? And how airplanes are built and delivered? Hint, delivery dates are not estimates and proposals that might be met, or maybe wont.
Both Boeing and Airbus have missed a bunch of delivery dates this year and will continue to do so. For some of them they're blaming regulatory approval. Guess what, it happens, life goes on, people in that industry can at least recognise that it's better than flying a plane that hasn't been approved.
> And what makes you think planes don't have to safe for flight, with controls and sign offs, before take of?
They do, and again the point is: what happens if the plane isn't ready? It doesn't fly until it is. They don't ignore the checks because they have a deadline.
Missing a deadline doesn't mean that deadlines are pointless. And yes, Airbus and Boeing missed those. Guess what, they had to pay contractual penalties.
You want to do creative work without deadlines and real world consequences for missing those? Become an artist, a rich one preferably because sponsors and exhibitions are a thing in the art world, too.
Depending on the contract, missed deadlines usually have penalties. There is a reason for deadlines, especially for complicated projects. The reason being other people have to plan their time to make use of their available resources profitably.
> The delivery date is an estimate and the date can shift until the plane is safe to fly. The deadline for delivery is not a true deadline and the factory will only work to its safe production limit to deliver the plane.
Boeing and Airbus tend to hit their deadlines for supplying planes all the time. Where is this hypothetical universe where they refuse to give a deadline, or refuse to meet it?
The delivery date is an estimate and the date can shift until the plane is safe to fly. The deadline for delivery is not a true deadline and the factory will only work to its safe production limit to deliver the plane.
A bad practice would be to just put the plane out on the tarmac, regardless of state.
It works to the safe productivity limit of the factory, not the arbitrary demand of the customer.