Posted by
Rick on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 9:31:17 AM
Bring it on! The Chinese have decided that the country can build passenger jets as well as Boeing/Airbus. Boeing is a publicly-owned corporation here in the U.S. and is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Airbus has decided to develop the A380, which is GREAT, but my fear is that it will take longer than they expected to turn a profit on this adventure, and its share-holders will want a few heads. The use of the A380 may be so expensive for its customers due to the changes in airport layout that the plane will demand due to its huge passenger capacity, but let's save this discussion for a later time.
Boeing turned its back on the super-jumbo idea, wisely, and opted for the 787. These are nice planes, and their market research will prove correct. It's only a twin-engine plane and will be a boatload cheaper to fly than that boheamoth A380.
The Chinese are acting like three-year-olds in that they think that they can have something like a super-jumbo-jet if they wish for it hard enough! Mao already tried this in the '50s with his ham-fisted takeover of his coutry's steel industry, and people ALL over the country starved due to the quality of the product. The material "the people" produced was too low of a grade for it to be used productively, and the country starved due to it being unable to produce food at previous levels.
As it is often-said, those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. For those of you too short-sighted to remember or study late Communist Chinese history, things your high school history book felt that you didn't need to know, really, China has tried this before.
Mao's "new world order" of the '50s and '60s convinced the people that they were capapable of producing the SAME exact product, in this case, STEEL, that a large company could produce, but in Mao's China, there is no need for a middleman. Communist dogma went "BELIEVE and you can ACHIEVE" should those terms also rhyme in Mandarin! Communism tells its followers that they need only to BELIEVE that their product is equal to the commercially-produced product, and it will be so.
Sure, they produced STEEL, but what Mao FAILED to explain to his people was that there are grades to steel, and the steel that his people produced on their own was at the lowest end of the spectrum - utterly useless. In Mao's eyes, however, and for the good of his Communist party, if it looks like steel and feels like steel, then it MUST be steel. MILLIONS of people DIED due to this effort because the country could not produce the equipment it needed to manufacture the products his "revolution" demanded due to the low-grade steel that they produced. People STARVED to death! Ha! Mao carved, and people starved! *laughter*
There are so many regulations associated with commercial aircraft, too! These commies think that they can enter such a market and bully their customers into buying their planes or bully their people to FLYING on the planes? It won't work. It will be a novel idea if they can get it to work, but you wouldn't see me buying stock in the insurance companies their test pilots use!