Comment by rsynnott

I mean, being one half of a duopoly can’t help. Even if an airline wants to buy A320neos instead of 737-Maxes, say, it realistically can’t; there’s a waiting list of years. The 737-Max can be almost arbitrarily bad, and people still have to buy it.

Arguably, this is on the FTC and EC; if the mergers which created Airbus and current-Boeing hadn’t been permitted, the market would look very different, and there’d be less space for making a Terrible Plane; no-one would buy it.

You see this elsewhere; look at the old Soviet/Warsaw Pact car industry, or somewhat more arguably the pre-European-accession British car market (before it joined the EU, the UK was quite protectionist around cars). _Terrible_ products, but people had to buy them because nothing else was realistically available. So, why bother putting any effort into making them good?