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Boeing and Airbus Can't Make Enough Airplanes To Keep Up With Demand (axios.com)
From a report on Axios: Aerospace manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus cannot produce airplanes fast enough to meet demand despite what the Wall Street Journal calls "one of the industry's steepest production increases since World War II." The run up in demand is partially the result of fast-growing airline industries in the Middle East and China. Manufacturers will need to increase production by 30% to meet current orders, and such booming demand is one sign of a healthier global economy.
From what I saw at my time with Boeing, they don't do well when they are under pressure. Things get rushed, forgotten or hastily slapped together. There was an anonymous thread a few weeks ago on an aircraft discussion board as to whether it was OK to use hardware store grade fasteners on aircraft structures. I shuddered. Because I've seen it come close to that when they ran out of approved parts.
Boeing (also known as the Lazy-B) builds good stuff when it's done at a leisure pace. But try to accelerate things and they go to hell pretty quickly.
Have gnu, will travel.
Boeing 787 was around a decade from initial "what can we do" to entry into service - the Airbus A350XWB was a little more at 11 years.
Neither manufacturer has a clean sheet design in the pipeline right now, so we probably wont see a new widebody until at least the 2030s.
According to this Boeing functionary I talked to it is easier to simply upgrade the tail section or the wings (or just parts of the wings and tail) and re-engine an existing aircraft design than to build a new design from scratch because that way you only have to get the new components certified. The fuselage pretty much does as good a job now as it did in the 1960s and 70s so you don't have to get that re-certified/tested/whatever only what you upgrade. That's why they are still building Boeing 737s, a design that first flew in 1967. Over the years they have upgraded various bits and pieces of the 737 until the modern aircraft have fairly little in common with the first 737s. This may seem weird, it did to me, but it's apparently a damn sight cheaper to do these bit by bit upgrades than designing a whole new aircraft to fill the same market slot. Designing building and getting a new design tested/certified/etc. only makes sense if nothing in your current inventory fits the market slot you have in mind or if the new design very significantly improves performance and therefore marketability.
Actually the article is a load of crap - Boeing is reducing 777 production right now, is in talks to end 747 production and has scrapped a production increase in the 787 (and may indeed scrap an entire production line in the next few years).
The only aircraft seeing production rate increases at the moment (that arent related to a new program coming on line, such as the A350XWB) are the A320 series and the 737 series - those sell well more than a thousand copies each year, with production lagging sales considerably.
Airbus is very competitive with Boeing on the 737 series and I believe both are struggling to undercut the other. Another thing that really hurts Boeing is Trump. If he implements his border taxes then their global supply chain is going to cost them big. I'm guessing they will shift to produce the aircraft outside the US entire and have foreign sales buy those. US sales might buy aircraft produced in the country, if Boeing can make it competitive but a lot of these suppliers have their own money tied up in things. It is not that easy to switch.
Either way if Boeing was doing that well then there would likely not see its employee count continuing to go down. link