The economies of scale enabled companies in aerospace, for example, to do the type of prototyping and testing that a smaller british manufacturer could not. The cold war enabled these companies to invest. And then just last point about the economies of scale. We mentioned the seven forty seven asa fascinating project because it was built a with no factory for it. They had to build it from scratch. To this day, i believe the the factory that they built is the largest facility in the world.
Transcript
chevron_right
Play full episode
chevron_right
Transcript
Episode notes
In 2019, Airbus surpassed for the first time Boeing as the largest aerospace company in the world, as two crashes of Boeing’s 737-Max airplane forced a grounding of the fleet and a halt in sales, eventually costing it $20 billion in associated fines and delays. While Boeing maintains a relatively strong overall safety record as measured by crashes per million departures, the production problems with the 787 Dreamliner in the mid 2010s and the recent 737 debacle has cast some doubt as to the management and engineering practices at the century-old American icon of industry. Tonight we delve into the roots of what made the company as successful as it was, as well as some of the key events that arguably led to its current troubles that date back well into the 1990s and beyond.
