To Discourage the Others

[NOMISYRRUC]

I've been accused of fantasy when I've suggested that the UK could have sold considerably more airliners rather than just more airliners if (what turned out to be) better decisions had been taken between 1945 and 1970. Is my suggestion more realistic than the gainsayers claim?

• In the current Britain-in-Airbus thread I've suggested that Boeing might not have launched the 757 if the British Government had forced it to order the A310 and have suggested that had it bought A300Bs instead of Tristars it might have wanted to buy A310s of its own accord. Boeing would have been in the same situation if it had been BA buying more Medway-Tridents, HS.134s or BAC.211s.
• One of the Boeing 737s launch customers was Lufthansa. Would Boeing have still launched the aircraft had the German airline bought a bigger BAC.111 powered by Medway engines? I suggested turning Medway-BAC.111, Medway-Trident and VC.10 into Proto-Airbus by having BAC & HS make French & German firms major subcontractors which would encourage the French & German Governments to make their state owned airlines buy them.
• I've also heard that at one point the 737 was selling so badly that Boeing considered ending production. It might have done that if a developed BAC.111 was taking some of its sales.
• If Medway-Trident was reducing the number of 727 sales Boeing might not have enough cash to cover its losses on 737.
• Going back to the 1960s... If Boeing was loosing 707/720 sales to VC.7 or the non-downsized VC.10 and 727 sales to Medway-Trident would it have decided to launch the 747?
• Meanwhile, at McDonnell Douglas... If the Firm was loosing DC-8 sales to VC.7 or the non-downsized VC.10 and DC-9 sales to Medway-BAC.111 would it have launched the DC-10? That's more likely to be Lockheed's gain rather than BAC or Hawker Siddeley's, but if all the extra Tridents have RB.211s instead of American engines, that's RR's gain.

A moderate number of lost sales in the 1960s might have a big effect on what Boeing and McDonnell are capable of doing in 1970s and after. America's airlines might have to buy more British and European products whether they want to or not and in spite of tariffs that make imported aircraft more expensive. They'll have to buy foreign if reduced profits force Boeing and MD to pull out of the civil aviation sector. As I've mention America's airlines, American Airlines was one of the launch customers of the BAC.111 in the "Real World" and bought 30. It might have bought more for longer had the Medway been available so the aircraft could have been developed in the same way that MD was able to develop the DC-9.

 

[EwenS]

I’ve always wondered if the real problem in Europe in the 1960s was too many companies each with insufficient financial muscle and individually with too small a local market (national rather than European let alone global) and with shorter distances between cities, more competition from other forms of transport, so less need for aircraft in the first place.

It doesn’t help when national flag carriers refuse to buy local product.

The US companies had a much bigger home market before they started due to the size of the country.

Boeing took a huge risk in the 1960s developing the 747. Did any individual European plane maker have the financial clout to even contemplate taking on that kind of risk?

Or maybe our bribes were just not big enough!

 

[Archibald]

My gut feeling is - individual European countries - France, GB and The Netherlands, because Fokker - did rather well. They could have done better with better decisions, for sure.

Great Britain post 1945 truly had a knack to shoot itself in the foot, notably in aerospace but also elsewhere.

France did well, but had its share of dumbarse decisions leading to commercial disasters. Caravelle was fine, but afterwards... ugh. Corvette vs Falcon, Mercure vs Airbus, Concorde inept business case (if there was ever any business case for it, outside "government vanity project with no escape clause ")

The Netherlands Fokker really did wonders with the F-27 and all the other types - until the 1980's when it started going under, unfortunately.

Germany tried hard to rebuild its aerospace industry but had its share of failures.

But, most importantly... even if all had gone perfectly well for British and French airliner projects, sooner or later they would have run into a bottleneck only Airbus solved (in a truly awesome way)

Sticky point: check the numbers of 727 / DC-9 / 737 narrow bodies churned by Boeing & MDD from 1960 onwards, for three decades until Airbus' A320 stole their thunder.
Hundreds if not thousands of airframes, efficiently delivered to airlines at blistering speed from order one. No stupid government-owned-airline requirements standing in the way of brutal commercial efficiency (to you, shrunk Trident with Speys instead of Medways, beaten into a pulp by the right-size 727 - but make no mistake, France had its share of equally stupid decisions like this: Late-631, LAnguedoc, Breguet Deux Ponts... they hurt ! Also Douglas screwing Sud Aviation to the deep end over Caravelle, until they improved it into the DC-9, those SOBs - ugly business there, but Sud was pretty dumb too.)

France and Great Britain could never, ever have churned Caravelles, Trident or BAC 1-11 in large numbers and fast enough to make airlines happy. The Caravelle started strongly but was soon flattened first by the DC-9 and then by the 727 and 737 tidal waves. Bac 1-11 and Trident were very fine airliners, but ended the same way.

It took Airbus A320 for Europe to churn narrow bodies by the hundreds and the thousands like sausages.

But Airbus had to absorb every single airliner factory across the entire Western Europe to reach critical production capacity.
It needed Filton and Toulouse and Hamburg and Spain and SABCA in Belgium and countless other plants, small and large, to start beating MDD into a pulp and then attack Boeing. Took the entire 1970's and 1980's and 1990's to make it happen. But when it happened, it was unstoppable - and still is.

So France & Great Britain certainly had the steel balls and industrial guts to make Airbus happen, but they had to unite first (Concorde at least was useful in the long term for that) - and then gather the rest of Europe around them. It was no picnic, for sure.

 

[Hood]

I am a self-confessed gainsayer and I think I have mentioned some incredulity of your airliner AU ideas before, not because I don't think Medway Tridents and Medway 1-11s and 3-11s aren't cool - they are. I just think in these scenarios Europe is quite frankly not the place to mass produce airliners.
It is not a coincidence that the US lead in airliner production since the 1930s in terms of technical advances, fleet numbers, air miles, passenger numbers, international route penetration, sales, exports etc. Indeed not until the deregulated international lower-fare mass air travel turned up in the 1990s did Europe find it could compete in numbers.

EwenS has more or less said what I have said before. Europe from 1950-1990 was crippled by several factors.

Arguably too few airlines I would say, national Flags held all the good long-distance routes and could call on government cash to buy new kit but always managed to weedle out of that fiscal reliance becoming dependency on home products. The remainder of the private industry was left with short-haul and not until the 1960s charter and package holiday market began to boom that they picked up. So yes, then 1-11s and 727s sold more but also a lot of second-hand aircraft too from Europe or the US. Second hand sales do naff all for production though and few charter airlines could really finance new kit without the bottom falling out and collapse).
Iron Curtain means no sales to half the continent so reliance on EEC nation markets.
Meanwhile the US is spanned with massive international airlines and the domestic market is continental-wide and far bigger scale. Deregulation made it even bigger.
The UK was obsessed with breaking into the US market (they mistakenly took it for read BOAC, BEA and all the ex-colonial affiliateds would tag only and buy because of the 'Made in Britain' label) but the US had more than enough of its home industry and not able to undercut on price or provide a better piece of kit (Viscount and Comet (briefly) being the only exceptions).

Too many manufacturers chasing the small market, there simply wasn't enough critical mass for 3-4 F-27 type aircraft or 2 A300s. Market forecasts were often as accurate as reading tea leaves and governments fell for them too when dishing out R&D (Labour by 1965 were getting sceptical).

Not enough input from the bean counters in design to ensure good economics. Too many technonerds; Autoland was cool but not a selling point to shift Trident stock, Concorde was a dead-end (even discounting environmental issues and fuel cost rises of the 70s), strange VTOL airliner obsessions.

Boeing had plenty of resource to so what needed to be done 367-KC135-707 is redesigned three times, 737 is redesigned even at launch to make it bigger to attract more sales.

Who could blame BOAC wanting Stratrocruisers and Starliners? Seeing PanAm, TWA, Eastern, American Airlines et al. swanning about the globe, transatlantic, transpacific, transcontinental in their shiny modern airliners when Avro and Handley Page are offering pressurised tubes on 1930s bomber wings. Then offering pressurized tubes on V-bomber wings (who cares if a third of the passengers are sat right behind four Olympus engines roaring in their earholes?).

Is the Lufthansa 737 giving birth to the 737 a convenient myth? United Airlines launched the bigger 737-200 (6ft longer, 3000lb more weight, 12 more passengers) in 1965 not long after Lufthansa's order and had their aircraft only two months after Lufthansa's -100s. Lufthansa brought 22 of 30 -100 Series, the -200 went on to sell 991. Even if Lufthansa hadn't ordered the 737 Boeing wouldn't loose any sleep once United commits to the bigger design. Lufthansa in reality brought a dead-end 737. Can you imagine Hawker Siddeley having the resources to sell the Trident to BEA, realise its too small and developing a larger gross weight version side-by-side?
And what does this say about the State-owned European airlines? Did Lufthansa and BEA coincidentally buy something too small by mistake or were they just behind the curve?

Arguably McDonnell Douglas ended up in the 'European' situation, not enough revenue to fund enough R&D to enable it to keep abreast of new developments to start clean sheet designs which led to DC-9 being coaxed out until it became the Boeing 717 in 1997 and the MD-11 reduxing the DC-10. Lockheed took big gambles on Electra and TriStar and got burned and never went back. Maybe (just maybe) Boeing struck it lucky?

 

[alertken]

Scale does not always win: no-one told Japan Auto: no way your modest domestic market can equip you to destroy MoTown Detroit. See, domestic appliances from S.Korea, Whirlpool gurgling. Part of their success included local licences, at least for assembly of knocked-down kits. Bristol explored that with Convair for Britannia, '53-ish; UK engine firms did it muchly; (Fokker did it for F-27); (Sud explored Caravelle with DACO).

I see 3 PoDs, where UK could have enhanced its Civil penetration:
- VJ Day,1945: sustain Big Turboprops intended for V-A Windsor, dying with it: Theseus, Clyde, Tweed. Hermes V...lost. Effort misdirected to Princess, T.167 Brabazon. Hindsight, of course.
- post-Korea, 7/53: Comet (before the disasters), Viscount, Britannia active, V1000 in design, virile schemes. One reason much fizzled was resources priority on Defence, precisely the Deterrent, and who is to say that was wrong? But maybe we can say this one has legs:
- 6/78: PM Callaghan visits Boeing/MDC to resolve what to do with his new (29/4/77) ward, BAe. He discussed (to be) 757 wing, and merging Twin DC-10 into (to be) A310, just launched, BAe. having no entitlement to its wing. Both US firms were picking the wallet, not the brains, of Italy, France, Japan, UK. Italy and Japan took the roles of subordinate Supplier, make-to-print, US design. They have been steadily busy ever since. He chose to join Airbus Industrie as voting Owner. Books have asserted he should have done many-Elevens.

UK Aero's actual outcome has been profit and employment as never before in Peace, free of the pain of Prime. Never forget that civil aircraft and their engines are sold on the Gillette Marketing mode: move the upfront Product at what you can get, then pillage the captive customer in the aftermarket.