AA buying A320's

[JFReservist]

My point is that capitalism in America could care less what's right or wrong, it's just the bottom line that counts. I'm not defending it, it just is what it is. I'm not bashing it either, it has many benefits too. It beats the alternative but it certainly isn't perfect.

That's not entirely true... people actually do care about quality. Look at the the tech sector... you can buy a crappy netbook or go buy an 11 inch MacBook Air. The price difference is well over 300% - same with cell phones. Capitalism and (more importantly) the Free Market have allowed us to innovate and produce amazing things - all driven by the ability to profit from innovation, which is (despite what most people believe) reinvested back into said companies to further compete in the free market. Another case in point is the p/u truck market (the age old Ford v. Chevy v. Dodge debate). Ford continues to outsell both in this market, while continuing to offer products that are 10-15% higher in price for comparable models.

As for the airlines, I've become convinced that people would pay (a bit) more for better service (the whole concept - from buying the ticket to picking up your bags at the end of a trip) as opposed to just buying the cheapest ticket on travelocity. They are hampered by at least two things - the availability of services in their market, and the perception that it doesn't matter who I fly, its all the same crappy service model.

Wave is correct, it is hard for a free market to truly and equitably compete against gov't subsidized products. Boeing's price points are higher on most offerings due to this and (yes, I'm going to say it) pi$s poor management and constrained labor factors.

The great news is that hopefully, our friends at AA are getting back into the game with a renewed focus and vigor, which is great for all of us in the long run and for the consumer who pays the bills!

Fly safe gents (and ladies!)

 

[JFReservist]

Dan - sorry, just re-read your post. Disregard - I was thinking of the consumer. Apologies. I could spend another few minutes replying (although I agree with some of your positions, but will always defer to an unconstrained free market) - I think I'm going to get another cup of coffee and go swim!

Cheers

 

[tomgoodman]

Airbus is subsidized by euro govts.

That's true. Their counter-argument is that Boeing has been subsidized for decades by the U.S. government, via military contracts. International subcontracting and co-production also complicate the "subsidy" question.

 

[ROSWELL41]

I've heard that the A320 has as many American-made components as the 787.

 

[Bringupthebird]

Boeing preferred to bow to SWA's demands on the 737 instead of spending time building a clean-sheet design that could wipe up the Airbus. Short-term mentality.

 

[ImbracableCrunk]

Airbus gets 910 orders at one airshow. Is SWA really that important, Boeing?

 

[Dan Roman]

Dan - sorry, just re-read your post. Disregard - I was thinking of the consumer. Apologies. I could spend another few minutes replying (although I agree with some of your positions, but will always defer to an unconstrained free market) - I think I'm going to get another cup of coffee and go swim!

Cheers

No worries, I'm having a cup of coffee and going for a surf (3rd day of the 1st good town swell of the summer!)
Wave, we agree on lot, your question is way to complex for an easy answer here. The whole subsidy thing could be a very slippery slope with airliners given just how truly international and multi layered the airline/airliner business is, WAAAY over my head to try and come up with a solution.
Your other point, it truly sucks what is happening to the middle class by the inherent greed of people masking it as free enterprise, in that respect we need more Government, not less. I also believe in free enterprise, you just have to look around this country to see how great our system is. But trickle down economics is a joke, it's there so a few can steal from the middle class, it doesn't work. We need government regulations to protect society.

 

[Bringupthebird]

Show how that has had the desired effect ANY time it has been tried!

The problem is that the middle class thinks and spends as if they are rich. No one will realistically admit how poor they really are. The housing collapse is proof enough for that.

 

[Quimby]

Show how that has had the desired effect ANY time it has been tried!

The problem is that the middle class thinks and spends as if they are rich. No one will realistically admit how poor they really are. The housing collapse is proof enough for that.

^^^^^
What he said.

 

[smoknjoe]

I just got the recall call yesterday. I am deferring but it would be nice to go back to an airplane I have been on for the last 7 years instead of a 80.
....Are you nuts? Are you really counting on hanging on "here"? .. Take care.. Joe...

 

[waveflyer]

Show how that has had the desired effect ANY time it has been tried!

The problem is that the middle class thinks and spends as if they are rich. No one will realistically admit how poor they really are. The housing collapse is proof enough for that.

Food for thought:

The GOP's Abstract Professors
Today's conservatives are no longer rooted in the reality of America, past or present.
"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
(See "The Heart of Conservative Values: Not Where It Used to Be?")

Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?

In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.
(See a dozen Republicans who could be the next President.)

Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.

But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"
(See "When GOP Presidential Candidates Skip, They Quickly Stumble.")

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all."
-Fareed Zakaria

 

[macdu]

I just got the recall call yesterday. I am deferring but it would be nice to go back to an airplane I have been on for the last 7 years instead of a 80.
....Are you nuts? Are you really counting on hanging on "here"? .. Take care.. Joe...

Do you know where I am? Or have been? Look at my avatar.

I am taking a few months of r/r.

 

[zawillif]

Airbus gets 910 orders at one airshow. Is SWA really that important, Boeing?

Most of these orders are not new. They were signed months ago and were announced at the airshow because Airbus likes to make headlines.

 

[HA25]

Food for thought:

The GOP's Abstract Professors
Today's conservatives are no longer rooted in the reality of America, past or present.
"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
(See "The Heart of Conservative Values: Not Where It Used to Be?")

Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?

In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.
(See a dozen Republicans who could be the next President.)

Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.

But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"
(See "When GOP Presidential Candidates Skip, They Quickly Stumble.")

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all."
-Fareed Zakaria

I'll give that a HUGE +1

 

[BoilerUP]

American buying A320s is about as likely as SWA buying the Bombardier C-Series...the possibility of both made news at the Paris Air Show.

Its little more than negotiating in public with Boeing.

 

[HA25]

American buying A320s is about as likely as SWA buying the Bombardier C-Series...the possibility of both made news at the Paris Air Show.

Its little more than negotiating in public with Boeing.

there are no 737 delivery slots anytime soon, so there is nothing to negotiate.

 

[BoilerUP]

there are no 737 delivery slots anytime soon, so there is nothing to negotiate.

Sure there is, principally the formal announcement of a 737NG replacement aircraft.

 

[HA25]

Sure there is, principally the formal announcement of a 737NG replacement aircraft.

well yeah, but that might be a day late and a dollar long... imagine the time it would take to roll it out? The 787 is now 4 years behind schedule... and I think American has been burned once too often by Boeing... Furthermore, the Airbus is a more efficient aircraft to operate and own.. Boeing is simply non-competitive with the 737 family and the time it would take to replace it is longer than American can wait.. Heck, the Chinese will have a narrow body out before Boeing ..

The A320 is a good airplane... anyone who knocks it is usually someone who's never flown it and knows nothing about it.. Moreover, the passenger comfort level (for a narrow body) is second to nobody.

 

[Guam360]

Do you know where I am? Or have been? Look at my avatar.

I am taking a few months of r/r.

tired of sweet n sour pork...or peking duck? It would be nice to return to a plane you've been flying vs. going back to an 80!!

good luck!

 

[SMcC]

The A320 is a good airplane... anyone who knocks it is usually someone who's never flown it and knows nothing about it.. Moreover, the passenger comfort level (for a narrow body) is second to nobody.

...quite true