Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, this might seem like the most obvious statement in the world, but I'm really worried about Boeing. And I don't mean like flying on one per se.
Oh really, well, I mean that's kind of what I would be worried about. But I feel like I need to do a disclaimer before we do this episode, which is that I have a massive soft spot for Boeing. I think a lot of Americans actually maybe still do. My dad flew be fifty two's and then he flew seven thirty sevens for a Southwest For a long time, I've been in a seven thirty seven simulator with him.
I covered airlines, not really aerospace, but airlines for a while, and so I feel like my life has to some extent been a little bit entwined with Boeing. A large part of my inheritance, if I get it, is Southwest stock which I think still kind of correlates with Boeing, given that their fleet is all seven thirty sevens. So there's my disclaimer.
That is a front that is a very a very good and thorough disclaimer.
No.
Like So when I say like I'm worried about Boeing, I mean I guess as someone who flies as a passenger, as a passenger occasionally. You know, Boeing is one of the most important manufacturers in the world, certainly to the US economy. Commercial aviation is one of the areas in which the US Boeing is still a dominant leader. It's
not one of these spaces that's like lost. It's you know, crown in one way or another to China the way we've seen in other industrial sectors, and you know, is this society it feels like, policy wise, we want to reinvigorate American manufacturing. We know about the importance of complexity, which is something that we talk about a lot on this show. Probably you know a Boeing plate. These are
among the most complex manufactured products in the world. And so if the pre eminent maker of planes in America is having perpetual trouble making planes, that worries me about the country.
So there's two things here. I think there's two ways of sort of thinking about what the Boeing story or at this point, the downfall of Boeing really says about the economy, and I say downfall because while it's true it hasn't been superseded by a Chinese manufacturer, it has lost a huge amount of market share ye to air Bus, its main competitor. So two things. So one absolutely indicative of I guess, the path of American manufacturing or industrial
capacity within the US. But I also think it says a lot about the structure of the economy and the wider incentives at play. And you think about, you know, concentration of corporate power. Boeing and Airbus are so emblematic of this. You basically have a duopoly, or you had for many years, and now we're kind of moving, I guess, to a monopoly as air Bus you know, sells even
more planes. But it's interesting to me both from a manufacturing perspective and also from an incentive perspective, like what are the decisions, what is the system in place that leads to an outcome where you have one or two extremely dominant manufacturers of something that's really.
Important totally And then of course you know, just sort of dovetailing on it what you said, like there's all these questions about sort of financial capitalism versus industrial capitalism, and whether you know, is this an area in which desire to boost the stock price through one way or another by increasing the dividend, allocating more to shareholders rather than reinvesting in safety, et cetera, like that, whether that was the impulse or whether that was a driver of
the troubles that we've seen at Bowing like huge, I just think like core questions for us, you know, in the US economy, Boeing.
Is sort of an expression at this point of some of the thorniest issues facing the US economy, Like it kind of encapsulates all of them.
So we really have to do a Boeing episode, probably more than one, but we got to start. So I'm really excited to say we literally do have the perfect guest today. We're going to be speaking with Peter Robinson. He is the author of Flying Blind, The seven point thirty seven Max Tragedy, and The Fall of Boeing, who is a New York Times bestseller. He's also our colleague, and he's an investigative journalist here at Bloomberg. So, Peter, thank you so much for coming on Odlocks.
Thank you for having me.
There's so many different ways we could begin this and there's so Boeying touches on so many things, But where does the story begin in your view or in your book literally, like when you think about the Boeing saga, where does the story begin?
Well, it really reflects some of the things that Tracy was saying, because this is a company where just about everyone that I meet has an incredible amount of pride in the product that they got into the industry because they wanted to build things that fly, They wanted to affect the future, they wanted work to have meaning. And I started covering this company in the late nineteen nineties, so I have a lot of history following it. What I noticed again and again was that these workers seemed
let down by management. They seemed let down by management who weren't investing for the future, who were pushing for free cash flow over investment in new products. And what we've seen increasingly over the last few years is the fallout of those really management allocation decisions that are being shown to be deeply flawed.
So we should probably talk about why we're doing this episode right now. Yeah, we kind of forgot in the intro. I guess it's a testament to just how many problems Boeing has had at this point with its new Max nine model. It's just been like, I guess, years and years of problems at this point, But why don't you explain what has happened recently? What's the latest fiasco in the history of this relatively new aircraft introduced by Boeing.
This is almost brand new aircraft. The Max nine is the latest version of I believe, the fourth version of the seven thirty seven, which dates back to nineteen sixty seven, and.
The world's most popular aircraft for.
A time, right for a time, Yeah, and best selling narrow body plane of all time, more recently superseded by Airbus.
But I'm sure people have seen the terrifying cell phone videos of a portion of the plane being ripped off and the plane landing with a gaping hole in its side, which Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said was our mistake, and the leading theory is that it was due to perhaps shoddy workmanship at either Boeing or its leading supplier, which used to be part of Boeing until an outsourcing strategy which was partly designed to raise free cash flow, led Boeing to sell that supplier, so of.
Course, now just again zooming out. Obviously January fifth, we've seen the cell phone videos of the door flying off and sort of miraculously nobody died. The plane was able to make an emergency landing. But of course, the story in many people's minds beginned in twenty eighteen with the two crashes, one in late twenty eighteen, one in early
twenty nineteen with the seven thirty seven Max. What is the seven thirty seven Max Actually, when there is a seven thirty seven Max eight or seven thirty seven Max nine, what is this product?
It is a roughly one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty seat airplane that is designed to be the most cost effective a to B device in the skies. The seven thirty seven is designed for quick turnaround short haul flights. It's meant to be extremely reliable and cost effective for the airlines, so a lot of flow cost airlines like Southwest fly the seven thirty seven and the Max.
As you mentioned in twenty eighteen, had the Max eight had just been introduced and in the space of five months had two crashes that were found to be due to a flight control system that had been implemented without telling the pilots it was there, and pushed the nose of the plane into the ground without them being able to control it.
So I realized, it's early days on the most recent incident with the Alaska Airline plane and the door kind of blowing out. But what do we know so far about that particular situation? And I guess what's the significance of the difference of something happening with, say, you know, bolts not being drilled correctly versus a problem in the flight control I guess essentially software of previous crashes.
In some ways, this could be seen as potentially as a simpler problem than the problem with the flight control software, because that was the flight control software was a design issue that required extensive reworking of the software and retraining of the pilot. In this case, it seems that someone didn't do their job and there wasn't potentially a second
set of eyes on the work that was done. So what happened was that a portion of the plane that would have looked like a window to passengers was actually behind the wall an emergency exit, and there was a plug door put over that part of the plane, and that plug door as the plane reached sixteen thousand feet,
escaped the plane, and the hole opened. And the theory is that there are just four bolts that attached this plug door to the plane, and either they were not fastened properly or they simply weren't installed at all.
Escaped the plane is a very creative way of saying, like catastrophic in flight decompression. But here we go, Yes.
It would have been. It was terrifying to people.
On the plane.
The story that people tell or is this idea and you sort of already hinted at it, is like that at one point Boeing head and engineering culture, and I'm sure there still is a very intense engineering culture, but that was really dominant, and then it became more of a financial culture or a shareholder friendly culture. People were brought in and there was more focused on dividends, et cetera. And I get why people tell the story, but like,
what actually happened. What was the culture of Boeing, like maybe during its best days, and then when did that begin to change? In your view, and you're telling of the story.
I've talked to employees from pretty much every era, even back to the nineteen fifties, people who worked at Boeing, and the early stage of Boeing is very much this. You know, there's a saying that Boeing we hire engineers and other people. It was very much focused on product. It was focused on customers. It was, you know, will we'll have a service team when a new airplane was introduced, there would be a service team waiting at every landing
to see how the plane performed. Over time, as the company grew, especially as it became dominant at one train of thought is that complacency set in. Boeing at the time, by the nineteen eighties, had more than sixty percent of the market, and it did settle into essentially a duopoly with Airbus. The Triple seven in the nineteen nineties was, many people have told me, was the high point of Boeing's design culture. One person called it Boeing's camelot. What
happened after that point was two things. Boeing purchased McDonald douglas, and McDonald douglas was the also ran to Boeing's leader for much of the commercial jet age. That brought in McDonald douglas leaders who were trained more in the free cash flow approach to management, and especially one leader, Harry Stone Ceipher, who had been a disciple of Jack Welch, and it was very much raised the stock price by
not as much investing for the future. And if you're called in the late nineties was also the time when Jack Welch was seen as the paragon of corporate culture.
Cults of ge This kind of leads into something I wanted to ask, but why did Boeing feel This might be a weird question, but why did it feel financial pressure at all? Given that, you know, it was the leader in aerospace manufacturing at that moment in time. It wasn't like anyone was really doing better than it, at least until I guess until Lee he came in as the Airbus CEO.
That's an interesting question. They felt two kinds of pressure. They felt market pressure because Airbus came in and did have extensive state support and built what was considered a very very very good airplane, the eight three twenty, which had fly by wire technology and electric sensors that Boeing's seven thirty seven didn't have. It was a more analog plane that was using cables and pulleys to connect to
the flight surfaces. So so there was some you know, real competition from the point of view of the products, and there was always the comparison Boeing. Boeing would be compared to other industrial companies, and the comparison company for Boeing was General Electric, and so Phil Condit, the CEO in the late nineties and early two thousands, would be compared quite critically by Wall Street analysts to Jack Welch, Why aren't you raising the cash flow like he is?
Why aren't you raising the dividend?
It's so crazy to me that people made that comparison when it's like GE making, I mean not exclusively, but consumer appliances versus the company designing planes. They did make engines, right, yeah, they have a huge engine. That's fair, but like but still there's a lot more I guess leeway when you have an industrial conglomerate, maybe to experiments when you're making different one thing.
Complete completely agree. Okay, So they brought in McDonald douglas executives, some of whom or at least one of whom was a Jack Welch ecolade. Wall Street started comparing its margins to GE and too well, you know the influence of jet watch thought all over the place from the perspective of engineers within the company, what did they notice as these as this new breed brought in? Were there changes in what they were told to do? Like, what did they How did that manifest itself internally?
That's a good question. They started feeling it in all sorts of ways. One was One good example is their
employee evaluations. I saw one engineer's evaluation where the manager had noted ideas are measured in dollars or as the MAX was being developed, which was a time when when Boeing did have cash but instead was spending between about twenty thirteen and twenty eighteen about forty billion dollars on buybacks, but the MAX, the engineers were noticing was was held to a tight budget and they were told that any changes would have to buy their way onto the airplane.
So that when one engineer proposed adding a check and balance of the flight controls that would have potentially noticed the issue with the flight control software that led to the crashes in eighteen and nineteen, was told that, no, you.
Basically anticipated my question. But when you look at what happened in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, can you just sort of tell the story, this sort of succinct version of the story about what was going on inside Boeing that they made this software change and apparently did not communicate well to pilots or to the airlines buying the planes that this change had been made.
It became over time, it became a very compartmentalized organization, a lot of different silos, and there was one silo that was looking at the issues that were raised by the larger engines that were put on the plane. The larger engines, you know, potentially made the plane more prone to stall. So one group of engineers added this software that would push the nose down, and late in the process there was a decision made to tie that software to a single sensor, the AOA gauge, which is prone
to you know, bird strikes, it's prone to various failures. Separately, there was a group at Boeing that we're working with working with the FAA and pilots on the flight manual for the plane, and the flight manual showed that there were no changes to the flight control software. MCAST was
not described. Late in the process, it was discovered that there were these certain conditions where the nose of the plane could be pushed down, but it did not appear in the flight control manual, so it was a miscommunication. And ultimately what the JUST Department found is that a couple of Boeing's employees who learned about this change late should have told the FAA, should have brought in the FAA and had that included in the manual.
How do you just aggregate I guess corporate short termism and the drive for profits and bureaucratic oversights that led to two massive tragedies. I think more than three hundred people killed in both those crashes, versus Boeing catering to what customers were asking for. Because I remember in sort of the mid twenty tens, you know, oil prices were
going up. The refrain in the aerospace industry was always make the planes more efficient, more efficient, more efficient, and the larger engine sizes that were you located closer to the front of the aircraft that eventually had to be offset with the new flight control system MCAST. It was a result partially of trying to make the plane burn less fuel and I guess to some extent give the airlines what they were asking for.
Yeah, it's I mean, it is a it's an industry that's under tremendous cost pressure. In this case, as Boeing set itself, it was a few lines of code. It didn't it wouldn't have costed anything to do the job correctly. As you're saying, it is partly pressure from customers that's driving this, and it was you know, in some ways Southwest desire to keep the plane similar to previous versions that led to some of the cost pressures.
How do you balance like the drive for continuous improvement and efficiency with like the dangers of over engineering or creating these kind of problems.
You know, the simple is always better, And in some cases Boeing's management lines became awfully confused. In the case of the Max, the engineering team was reporting to a business unit manager and it was the business unit manager who was making these decisions. There was a they called it a countdown clock that was put up near that person's desk so the engineers could see, you know, exactly how much time there was left.
Maybe, you know, the Tracy's question makes me think about this question in another way. But there's complexity, and there's sort of these weird business lines of reporting as you've just mentioned, versus again the sort of shareholder capitalism and buybacks and the lack of investment or the lack of reinvestment or internal investment. Like, how much of the story setting aside uses of capital, how much is it a story of the company just became as a corporation internal
and weirdly complex. And now I'm thinking, Tracy about our episodes on software and that maximum we talked about it that the software product itself becomes a reflection of the complexity.
Yeah, but the irony was that, like the A three twenty is the more complex of the aircraft.
Well, they're too.
Like I'm also curious, like why haven't some of these same issues bedeviled Airbus the same?
Yeah, that's the question I was going to ask, like why has an airbus succumbed to the same financial incentives that have been Boeing's downfall.
Or the internal the complexity of a gigantic flying machine.
I mean, I think one difference is that it is in Europe, it is not to this point, it's not the same shareholder driven culture. And you know, consistently the capital expenditures have been higher at Airbus. We had some numbers on Bloomberg, you know, showing that over the last ten years, Airbus's revenue has has grown Airbus as capex has grown, Boeing the revenue has declined and the capex has declined, So there's there's a more long term management focus.
I was told there isn't the same higher and fire mentality, that there are stricter work rules so that you may not have the turnover. You know, if employees that you see in the United States, should Boeing be nationalized.
Some people would argue that Airbus, I mean, what you're alluding to is like Airbus is almost someone's going to get someone's going to get very nice.
But it's the least perceived right to be more evasive to.
The facto nationalized kind of Please don't ut me online.
I believe there are big like WTOL fights over the TI.
Yes, yes, but that's a good way of putting it.
It's an interesting question. I've wondered that myself. I think you mentioned, you know, other countries coming into the market. China has an airplane that you know, like they've delivered one or two a year so far. It's probably not a viable competitor over ten years. But if Boeing doesn't get its act together. You have to wonder if nationalization is a possibility. It's got forty billion dollars in debt. You can't imagine a future where the US wouldn't want
to maintain a viable commercial aircraft manufacturer. It's also so important for military aircraft in some ways, as you alluded to, it is state supported already through the military and space contracts.
What happened after twenty nineteen? So, I, you know, I don't remember. I didn't follow it that closely, but you know, I assume that after the crashes in twenty nineteen and the flaws discovered with the software, et cetera, we're discovering. I imagine management, you know, went through a big thing of we're changing, We're going to change the culture. We're going to focus safety as our number one party. I'm
just imagining. I don't I didn't see that, but I imagine they said things like safety is our number one priority. There were memos, yoah, many memos about all that stuff. What did actually happen though? Did the company change in any way after the second crash in twenty nineteen, Well.
You've imagined the messaging exactly right. There were times in the you know mid OUs when Boeing wouldn't mention the word safety and SANDUM report, but Dave Calhoun taking over as CEO mentioned safety was the number one priority many many times. There was a safety committee created for the board of Boeing shockingly didn't even have a committee dedicated
to safety until the mac accidents. And I'm told that Dave Calhoun, you know, talked extensively to Mike Fleming, who was the exact in charge of the Max's return to service. I'm told that he talked to him regularly. And what you're seeing is that throughout the organization the same problems are there. They're you know, Boeing is trying to get the production rates back up, especially since the pandemic, especially at a supplier spirit there was a lot of turnover there.
And what you're seeing is, you know, as Dave Calhoun said himself, that they need to renew the safety culture and they need to focus on it again.
What about the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. So I don't think we can have this conversation about the incentives and the structure of the system that created this bad outcome without talking about the relationship between Boeing and the FAA.
Yes, because that turned out to be a bad relationship. The FAA, especially the FAA management, began to see its role as to helping Boeing and its goal of delivering airplanes and the incentives for managers, you know, became almost to see the aircraft industry as the customer rather than as the regulated entity. And you know, I wrote about many cases in my book where the FA manager in charge of monitoring Boeing would then go on to get a job at Boeing or at you know, the industry
lobbying group. So that that problem with the revolving door is there in this case. Since the latest incident, the FAA, at least in its press releases, is being very careful to say that the plane will fly when we determine its safe. You know, we determine the timeline here.
On Calhoun, so I'm doing that. I'm doing the thing where I pulled up his Wikipedia page to look at his bios so you know, maybe it's wrong, right, but former ge guy and then he ran Nielsen, which I don't think is a manufact string company, and then he also joined the Blackstone and Group as a senior managing
director and head of private equity portfolio operation. What was the choice when he was elevated to become the CEO of someone who it's not obvious that their background is particularly engineering focus.
No, he well, he did come from GDGS, and yeah, he had been on Boeing's boards since two thousand and nine, so definitely not independent by any means. His Nielsen and Blackstone period. I wrote about this in my book. He went to Blackstone's annual conference and you know, this is again going back to twenty you know, twenty ten to twenty fourteen period and talked, you know, almost lovingly about the amount of cash, you know, the business was generating.
And he made appearances during this period about the amount of government regulation being not helpful. And yet he is the person in charge at Boeing now at this crucial time. I think one issue was that it would have been very hard to find anyone to take the job after Dennis Muhlenberg had been you know, so it really had been pilloried, you know, internationally for his handling of the
Max crisis. I did hear that Alan Molalley, who was sort of a much loved leader of Boeing, in the late night of the Commercial Airplanes Group in the late nineties early two thousands, a group of retirees wanted him to come back, and he replied, if asked, I will serve, But as far as I know, He asked, what.
Sort of response have we seen from customers of Boeing? So the airlines themselves, I have to imagine, and in fact we've already seen this since the first two crashes. But I mean, you have to be thinking twice about whether or not you want to purchase this aircraft.
Yeah, you're seeing it. You're seeing customers make decisions what they're purchasing. Used to be that Boeing was, you know, had sixty percent of the air body market. Now Airbus has six percent of the narrow body market, and customers are saying they need to get their act together. Tim Clark from Emirates has been saying this repeatedly for one Do.
You see customers asking for this? Was always a thing in airline and aerospace reporting. The purchase agreements for aircrafts were like massively secret, and I remember I used to know a cell side analyst whose dream was to one day see an actual contract for an aircraft purchase. I don't know if you ever got to see one, I'd
be interested to see one. But do you see people asking for discounts on the list prices or do you see people maybe I don't even know if this is possible, but embedding terms that are like, if there's another issue with this aircraft, then we want to get some sort of compensation or something out of it.
They do. They do get compensation. If planes are on the ground, there's you know, contradtually agreed compensations. So it's likely that something like that is you know, it will take place with Alaska and Boeing. In many cases, airlines who stepped up and bought the Max after the crashes likely did get discounts. So airlines are opportunistic in that way.
It's easy to point to Calhoun's ge in Blackstone and Nielsen and we saw did they engineers that you've spoken to within Boeing since he took over. I mean, it's one thing to say, Okay, we're going to have a safety board or a safety organ that reports to the board. Did they feel any different? Did they feel that there were changes internally in terms of taking the manufacturing and manufacturing quality more seriously?
That's a good question I'm I, you know, at the lower level, I'm not sure if people did feel that any differently. I think, you know, definitely at Spirit, the Spirit you know, which supplies to the fuselage for the seven thirty seven and then.
The airline, right, so there's Spirit Aerosystems. And was that a spin off of Boeing.
It was originally that was Boeing which hitah and it made the fuselage.
But now it's a separate company that does a lot of them yah factor yeah, okay, yeah.
So what they've experienced was that in the you know, sort of nineties early two thousands, they were part of Boeing that made the airplane, and they were a cost center that was spun off to a private equity firm and there was an attempt to turn that into a profit center. That proved very difficult because the airline industry is cyclical, and so when the pandemic hit, the production declined quite a lot, and you know Boeing had to you know, had had to redo its agreement to get
its more cat get it some more cash. So the supply base still feels pressure ultimately to raise production rates.
What impact do all of these issues and again at this point, there's sort of a long list. So in addition to the mcast failures that we've been describing, there's you know, what just happened with Alaska Air. There's also been like missing nuts on rudder control systems and a couple other smaller issues that have surfaced. But what impact does this litany of problems have on the morale of
engineers and what I guess, what are the options? Like if I'm a senior engineer working at Boeing and I decide this company is no longer for me, where do I go?
So the some of the knowledge that you get in the commercial especially for Boeing, you know, which which has this long running plane. I've talked to engineers who say that, you know, I'm not employable somewhere else because I know this you know particular facet of the seven thirty seven, but it's not you know, built that way in other places. You know that it really depends on the age of
the engineer. I mean, some of the older engineers may feel that they that their skills aren't transferable, but it definitely has an impact on recruitment and hiring. That was something I know that people at Boeing worried about after the MAX that young engineers might prefer to go to Blue Origin or SpaceX or or a tech company.
Interesting, Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Another example of like, you know, it's when we talked about the engineers not wanting to go to energy companies last year or two years ago, and they're just maybe more exciting places. What do you expect now? Maybe the seven thirty seven Max nine will be in the air again soon. I think there was a story today on the Bloomberg about the first batch of inspections having been made. Maybe the first
step to getting them back in the air. Is it just going to be another we take safety seriously, Like, what do you expect to see now?
I think it'll probably be weeks or months before the Max nine's are in the air again, and ultimately we'll have to see that gowing, you know, follows through and that we do see a real systemic change. You know, some of the analysts I've talked to are fairly pessimistic and think that what may happen is that this crisis passes and then another crisis happens at some point in the future.
So I should just say we're recording this on January seventeenth, and this is still a story that is unfolding in many ways. But what do you think will happen to Boig? I know it, maybe I'm putting you on the spot, but you've written a whole book on this topic. What do you think the outlook is.
I think the outlook is that, you know, sadly, I think it's it's going to be a long time before it is back to number one. It is going to be a sort of a number two in the aerospace industry. The Chinese competitor, or the COMAC in China is only making, as I said, one or two plans a year now.
But over ten years, you know, in ten years you could see if I've talked to some people who say they view that company almost like Airbus in its early days, where it's stays supported and people may not think much of it, but over time it becomes a viable competitor.
Peter Robinson, thank you so much for coming on the outlow those right, Thank you. Crazy. I just find that to be such a fascinating topic. You know, it's always tempting in any story. Seeing this is a metaphor for America. This is a metaphor for the American economy. And you know, but I kind of think in Bowing's case, there's a lot there to make that kind of legitimate.
No. Absolutely, And again there there's also this emotional attachment to the company, which you don't you don't get for your.
Case, a big financial aspect.
Financial incentive. No, that was super interesting. I'd love a chance to sort of reminisce about aviation. The thing that really strikes me is how much things have changed just in the space of like a little over a decade, because again I remember early twenty ten's it was Airbus going up against Boeing, really and I also remember I remember the first time no one's going to believe me, but I remember the first time I flee on an air bus and just sort of being like, oh, what
is this aircraft? And then I remember people talking about the A three twenty, and there was initially so much reticence about it. It was like, oh, it's too technical, there's too much software, it's too fancy, it's too French. I heard that many times, but then it dominates now, you know. I think Pete said like sixty percent of narrow bodies now are A three twenties, which again like a complete reversal to previously when it was sixty percent. We're, you know, Boeing.
There's also the irony or perversity, or maybe neither of those things, which is that air Bus is absolutely trounced bowing when it comes to stock price. So is you know, people will talk about, oh Boeing.
Yeah right, yeah, the ultimate irony. They did this all for the share price.
Like so all of this sort of you know, you know, this focus on delivering to shareholders, et cetera. And yet you know, if you look at the scoreboard, it's not even closed because you know, the stock is at levels seen in twenty seventeen as of right now, like Airbus is at an all time high, up massively since then. So it didn't even work to boost the share price.
I mean, of course it makes sense the stock's down another like twenty something percent just this year with the door blowout, but it is pretty striking how far it's fallen behind, just even on the financial metrics.
Really an incredible result. The other thing I was thinking after that conversation is, you know, we mentioned the Chinese aerospace manufacturer Comac a couple of times, but I do wonder. So, you know, they are growing, and they've had their first sales I think just in the last year. But is America ever going to be comfortable with a Chinese producing aircraft? I think that's still an open question.
Maybe not or maybe not for a long time. But will the least airlines be comfortable with the Chinese produced aircraft? Will other Asian airlines including say, you know, obviously the first of seven thirty seven crash in Indonesia, And so there are many markets. I mean, this is a huge one, you know, for the United States. This is one of our big manufacturing exports, and so maybe I imagine it would be a long time before we'd see a Comac see nine one nine or any other Comac plane in
the US. But in a bunch of markets where it's really important for you know, the for US exports, it doesn't seem very implausible at all.
Yeah, definitely an interesting conversation and probably one that we can follow up on. Yeah, I imagine, shall we leave it there for now?
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and.
I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart, follow our guest Peter Robinson at Peter M. Robinson and check out his book Flying Blind, The seven thirty seven Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot and kel Brooks at kel Brooks. And thank you to our producer Moses Onam. And for our Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we
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