Boeing; range & power even back in 1967......

[Caravellarella]

Dear Boys and Girls, here is a striking Boeing Aircraft Company advertisement in French from the 15th November 1967 issue of Aviation Magazine International. It dates from the time of the formation of Airbus Industrie and it proclaims Boeing's ability to offer a full range and family of aircraft products.

It shows (to me) that Vickers/BAC, Sud Aviation, De Havilland/Hawker Siddeley, Convair & Fokker never really stood a chance. As it turns out, Lockheed & McDonnell-Douglas were unable to compete in the longer term. To me, it puts paid to bleating about Vickers VC-7s, Airco DH.121 Medway Tridents and VC10 conspiracy theories; shows the fallacy of tailoring a commercial airliner design to the requirements of a single customer and how the failure to offer/continue to develop a family of aircraft means loss of the customer base

Am I being controversial?

Terry (Caravellarella)

 

[alertken]

Product Family is an auto-industry notion imported to commercial aero by Management Consultants. It led to Boeing buying DHC, to offer an entry-level product...and getting out of that morass as pronto as could be.

IMHO: it's a nonsense. If I were to be (so foolish as to choose to) buy a new car, I would look at the deals by competing suppliers, of whom my existing supplier would be one...if he had well-supported me to date. Best deal wins. Loyalty - nah! Sunk investment continuity/commonality is modest in aero: every nut and bolt stocked for the superseded aircraft type is incompatible with the incoming type. 737-200 in no way helped the transition to 737-300, and on to NG 737-700. Airbus' Common Type Rating on its sidestick-models has been the first such...but does not of itself lock an A320 Operator into buying A330. The Deal Rules, OK!

Vickers could have/should have sold to operators with a Boeing Baby below and Jumbo above VC-anything.

There were no conspiracies causing market failure of VC-7/VC10/DH.121 (or VFW-614, or Mercure): buyers took the best deal on offer on the day. A mistake made by UK firms was to believe that engineering excellence was of market value. It's not. Cents per available-seat-mile.

 

[JFC Fuller]

There were no conspiracies causing market failure of VC-7/VC10/DH.121 (or VFW-614, or Mercure): buyers took the best deal on offer on the day. A mistake made by UK firms was to believe that engineering excellence was of market value. It's not. Cents per available-seat-mile.

And that is just the start, British engineering excellence was hobbled by un-modernised industry (inc supply chain) increasingly dependent on US machine tools when they could be afforded (even spitfire machine tools from the US? Blue Streak also) leading to inferior systems engineering (see Avro Tudor criticisms from Gordon Store) coupled with the UK not being a natural airliner market being small and densely populated, especially after the end of empire.

All of this compounded by the remarkable (but perhaps not unsurprising) ability of the UK government to invest in the wrong things whenever it chose to invest (and I think it should not invest unless the circumstances are perfect), Imperial Airship Company, Bristol Brabazon, Concorde being the big three civil aviation blunders.

Then Boeings advantages, a consolidated large aircraft industry flush with cash and design + manufacturing experience from B-17/29/50/47/52 + KC-135 compared to UK firms with only 30s bomber designs produced throughout the war and sold near cost followed by few mediocre derivatives of those 30s bomber designs sold before fragmented V-Bomber effort- bright shining light of Comet turns out to be flawed in its first incarnation.

And for anyone stupid enough to think the UK still held the prospect of a lavish lifestyle for engineering entrepreneurs one look at the higher income tax rate would have convinced them of the merits of exile on main street. By contrast the rest of the workforce often felt little need to work, strikes plaguing industry throughout the era.

 

[Apophenia]

Product Family is an auto-industry notion imported to commercial aero by Management Consultants. It led to Boeing buying DHC, to offer an entry-level product...and getting out of that morass as pronto as could be...

Buying DHC was a very odd way of getting "entry-level" commuter and regional aircraft when, in the end, Boeing Canada ended production of every DHC product other than the Dash-8.

My guess is that extending the 'Product Family' made sense to the MBA crowd at Boeing HQ while the engineering draw was V/STOL work being done by DC Whittley et al. Once in the door, Boeing would've realized that they didn't need any help from DHC on augmentor-wing military transports or lift+cruise fan airliners.

Re: VFW-614 & Mercure. These examples may not support the 'Product Family' idea but what about the general ability to provide product support for an airliner? It would seem that having a larger range of aircraft types with some commonality increases the odds of having a robust supply line. Maybe the bean counters got it right by mistake?

Then there's the marketing crowd. Boeing promoted the DHC-6 as a commuter airliner instead of a STOL rough field specialist. VFW did the same for the 614. Obviously the marketers have a preference for prestige sales and the respective managements didn't care much for slower but longer-term sales potential.

 

[uk 75]

The Boeing 707 must rank as the most important airliner in history. The 747 runs it a close second. Both revolutionised air travel on a global scale. But the limits of even Boeing's reach is shown by the 2707.

 

[JFC Fuller]

The Boeing 707 must rank as the most important airliner in history. The 747 runs it a close second. Both revolutionised air travel on a global scale. But the limits of even Boeing's reach is shown by the 2707.

Actually I think it demonstrates the reason for Boeings success, they abandoned it rather than risk their own cash on it, supersonic airliners turned out to be a dead end and the right decision was made in abandoning it (and from a Boeing perspective in it being a federal rather than Boeing project). The key to running a business is to understand what it is that your potential market REALLY needs (and will thus ultimately pay for), not what it would like to have and not what others would like it to have etc. And Boeing has consistently managed this. The 2707 would have been (even more than it was) a waste of development resources and money for Boeing in a similar fashion that Concorde and the various VSTOL experiments were a squandering of what was left of the UK aerospace industry and the capital and political will to support it.

 

[uk 75]

SL Entirely endorse your comments re Boeing and the 2707. What I meant was that
in 1967 Boeing along with most other folks thought the future lay in the SST and its 2707 was the answer. Events moved quickly after this ad was produced. Boeing first had to re-design its plane and as you say in 1971 they were shot of it. Books about Boeing seem to differ on how much the firm saw this coming. After all in 1967 the 747 was being seen as a freighter-conversion type in the 70s. That also shows the customer focus of the firm.

The Boeing 707 got so much right that the equivalent British designs: Comet and then VC 10 failed to. Primarily the UK was a poor market to use as a home base. Boeing had Pan Am, TWA, American and United. We were stuck with BOAC, who could never make up its mind.

 

[JFC Fuller]

The Boeing 707 got so much right that the equivalent British designs: Comet and then VC 10 failed to. Primarily the UK was a poor market to use as a home base. Boeing had Pan Am, TWA, American and United. We were stuck with BOAC, who could never make up its mind.

It is more fundamental than that. The UK is not a natural market for an airline, it is a small densely populated country just over the sea from its major market. Its relatively small state owned airlines being indicative of that. As such they could never have supported the big airlines that grew in the US (that had the advantage of a much healthier economy to boot) before we even get to the issues of BOAC (largely from the fact it got regular government hand outs) and the problems with the aerospace industry.

 

[Caravellarella]

The Boeing 707 got so much right that the equivalent British designs: Comet and then VC 10 failed to. Primarily the UK was a poor market to use as a home base. Boeing had Pan Am, TWA, American and United. We were stuck with BOAC, who could never make up its mind.

Boeing started to pull ahead of its competitors by offering the Boeing 720 & 720B derivatives of the domestic 707-120/220 for medium range markets (knocking Convair out of the picture) thus widening its product range to suit a variety of customer requirements. Douglas had no answer to the 720/720B. Convair lost a valuable major order for the Convair 880 from United Air Lines Inc (a DC-8 operator) who chose the 720-022 instead; Convair never recovered. American Airlines Inc chose both the 720/720B and Convair 990A, but soon realised that Convair couldn't delivered promised perfromance guarantees and soon replaced their CV-990As with a mix of 707-123Bs and more 720-023Bs.

The biggest step forward was probably the Boeing 727-100 and the speed at which Boeing brought it to the market in 1963/64. The 727 never had a serious competitor in terms of payload-range performance, field performance (spectacular) and in service support. Boeing never looked back after the 727......

Terry (Caravellarella)

 

[lastdingo]

Family standardisation only became a major factor with the standardised two-men cockpits (around A310 iirc).

 

[JFC Fuller]

Caravellarella

Exactly, and each of those products was carefully matched to well perceived customer requirements.