[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?

[notahacker]

> 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.

It means that there's no incentive to be a "design licensing entity" that takes on all the cost and risk of designing, prototyping certifying an airframe and then shares the returns on making that airframe with a bunch of competitors that take on no such risk. Either the royalties are set very high in which case you're creating massive chaos for no meaningful price reduction, or you've made new aircraft development in the United States commercially unviable and accidentally given Airbus a global monopoly on 150+ seat airliners...

> 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.

It's the illusion of market competition because the only way a company licenses IP it spends billion dollars a year updating and testing so that other manufacturers can undercut it on sales is if the government steps in and sets the price and decides who should and shouldn't be licensed 787 integrators (otherwise the answers are "too high for anyone to get involved" and "no, you guys that didn't coinvest in its development can't have licenses to sell anything more valuable than PMA parts"). And in practice not only do you get the government determining who is allowed to build 787s at what price, but also needing to underwrite the development costs, since "invest several billion in complex technology innovation; government will then determine the royalties you are entitled to earn from it" is not really an attractive proposition

> 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?

Yes, monopolists care more about maintaining the reputation of technology they've spent billions designing than random new market entrants established to manufacture others' IP more cheaply than them. Funnily enough subcontractors with little stake in the 737 specifically and the resulting diffusion of responsibility was the cause of the emergency door defects, and they're not going to do anything to solve MCAS either...