[AnthonyMouse]

> governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.

The correct answer to this is to break up consolidated markets with antitrust. Are there only two airframe manufacturers left? Then chop them into smaller pieces so there are more. Reduce vertical integration so that it gets easier for new entrants to compete at any given part of the supply chain without needing to duplicate the entire thing themselves. Let each of the spin offs start with a non-exclusive license to the no longer existent parent company's technology so they all have the chance to iterate on it and compete for providing it.

And don't let them buy each other again.

[notahacker]

Problem with antitrust hammers is that once you've chopped Boeing into bits you don't end up with a competitive market with lots of new aircraft designs, you end up with a global Airbus monopoly on aircraft over 150 seats and the few surviving bits of Boeing competing to sell into its supply chain...

Airframers really aren't that vertically integrated as companies go. But it turns out the business of designing, certifying and selling an aircraft (and managing complex multinational supply chains) is hard, and airlines don't want 6 competing types of narrowbody in their fleet, they want one type of narrowbody in their fleet with an abundance of type-rated pilots, multiple maintenance options and a robust aftermarket.

[AnthonyMouse]

> airlines don't want 6 competing types of narrowbody in their fleet, they want one type of narrowbody in their fleet with an abundance of type-rated pilots, multiple maintenance options and a robust aftermarket.

Which is in itself a regulatory problem. Why is the government certifying only a specific company's design, granting them a lock on the market for everything to do with it?

Certifications should work in one of two ways. Either the industry comes together to submit a royalty-free design IETF style and then anybody can make it, or they certify a specific company's patented design and that company is prohibited from making it themselves and can only license it in exchange for a fixed fee per-plane, no license restrictions other than the payment of the fee, and a requirement to publish the uniform fee and charge the same amount to all producers. Then you get a company that designs planes but a competitive market for producing and maintaining them. And a requirement that Airbus do the same thing, because why should foreign companies be exempt from antitrust laws when they want to sell to the domestic market?

Notice also that the traditional 737, 757 and 777 are all over 20 years old, which is the term of a patent. In the absence of some chicanery that means they should all correspondingly be available for anyone to produce by now or design variants of which share parts and should only need partial rather than full recertification.

There is no reason it needs to work the way it does other than regulatory capture.

[nradov]

What a silly idea. Design and manufacturing of something as complex as an airliner is inextricably coupled. There's no way for one company to design the whole aircraft and then just hand it off to others. We're not talking about toasters here.

[AnthonyMouse]

> There's no way for one company to design the whole aircraft and then just hand it off to others.

This is exactly what they do anyway whenever they subcontract any part of the production. You don't need a single company that makes the entire plane and don't even have that now. You can have companies that make engines, other companies that make the passenger seats, other companies that make the fuselage, other companies that do final assembly, etc.

There is nothing stopping the designer from talking to the manufacturing companies while creating the design. They could even be one of the manufacturing companies, they would just have to spin off the design licensing company into an independent entity at the point the design is certified.

[notahacker]

Considering the design and certification is the expensive bit that needs thousands of sales to break even (want certification to be cheaper? Well I guess if you like more crashes) I'm not sure what some artificial separation of design and systems integration to create the illusion of a competitive market achieves, except perhaps worse safety as suddenly you've got a lot of companies selling the same licenced design manufactured by the same supply chain competing only on how many QC corners they can cut to reduce prices...

[AnthonyMouse]

> Considering the design and certification is the expensive bit that needs thousands of sales to break even

What does that have to do with it? The design licensing entity is going to get a fee per-plane from every company doing final assembly. They're going to set the fee high enough to cover their costs but not so high that people go to a different design from another company instead.

> the illusion of a competitive market

How about an actually competitive market, because anyone can get the design on the same terms and can't use an exclusive right to foreclose competition in parts of the supply chain other than the one which is supposed to be under patent.

> competing only on how many QC corners they can cut to reduce prices...

As opposed to the monopolist whose customers can't even switch to a competitor when the supplier has a safety scandal, yet operates under the same profit incentive to cut costs?