On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:49:23 -0700, Mike Kanze
wrote:

If McDonnell-Douglas were still a separate company, we could do a
conversion of the C-17 airframe to a tanker as plan B.

Personal opinion: If MD had not merged with Boeing, it would likely be
bankrupt today, or teetering on the edge, or seeking the sale of its
more profitable units (which would NOT include production of "heavies"),
or seeking a different merger partner.

Maybe, but that merge & RIF trend that started in 47 is one that has left
us without a lot of alternatives and it leaves us with no technical
defense in depth when a designer or design team hit's it's slump. When
Donovan Berlin, (P-40) started turning out turkeys, guys like Kelly
Johnson and Lee Atwood were there to take up the load. There's nothing
like that now, especially since instead of experienced designers, you have
twenty plus year product development cycles which means that the guy who
designs an airplane maybe gets to complete one in his career. That whole
trend is suicidal for us.


Today's global economics of "heavies" manufacture boil down to only
three players: Boeing, EADS, and the output of Russian industry. (China
may be a future player.) MD's "heavies" business would have made it the
fourth horse in a three-horse race.

True, but a fourth horse would have made us a lot better off. As it is, I
really hate to reward Boeing. They didn't respect their customer because
they figured that the Air Force had no real choice in the matter. They've
been outsourcing a lot of prime technology to China, and that's gonna come
back, and nail us right where it hurts.

At the rate things are going, we might be smarter to just buy surplus
747s that are in storage at Mojave and put fuel cells and a boom on those
and declare it a supplemental interim system while we encourage somebody
else to get into the large airframe business.

The whole thing makes me wish that I had a time machine so that I could
go back and strangle Stewart Symington, because he's the one that started
this disaster. We should have stuck to the open market system we had in
the 20's & 30's rather than letting Symington and the Air Force pretty
much apply Mussolini's economic theories to the defense sector and
especially to aircraft production.

Either way though, rewarding Boeing and it's pack of crooked politicians,
leaves an extremely bad taste, and it encourages a system where we've got
no viable options if one of the designated hitters screws up.

It's no accident that most of the real innovation you see in aviation
right now is being done by the guys who do pilotless aircraft. The big
companies really didn't fight to monopolize that market and the Air Force
wasn't paying enough attention to rationalize them by merge & RIF as a
result of the Air Force being the sole buyer and sales agent for what they
produce.
We're lucky that the Air Force lost it's bid to become the sole executive
agency for unmanned aircraft because that merge & RIF policy would have
been imposed on them next.

If we want to really fix things, we need to step away from the current
suicidal policy and go back to an open market in military systems.
Symington's creation is gonna leave us with an Aviation Industry every bit
as extinct as Britain's. And why we chose to copy the Brits industrial
policies as far as military systems go, eludes me. They merged & RIFed
until they got down to one major company, Hawker Siddley and one
specialist helicopter producer, Agusta-Westland, and now, as nearly as I
can tell, it's all EADS and their ability to produce the kind of
innovation that leads to a viable military capability is suspect. When
their prime design team hit's it's slump, they've got,............Nothing!

And I hate looking down the muzzles of a resurgent and revanchist China
with as thin of an industrial base as we've got and that's especially when
you consider aircraft.




--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.