[peblos]

Selling 6 planes is nothing. It wouldn’t even cover the standby aircraft of many fleets. You need large orders to make it feasible, and you need a strong product to secure those orders. FedEx, UPS and co. aren’t going to fund you long term unless you have a product and you need good teams and good funding to even get you to that starting block.

Boom is probably the closest thing to what is suggested but many still doubt they will make it to production. That’s minimal investment though and mostly around options on orders, so they still need massive funding to get there. Rolls Royce and others have said it’s not viable to design an engine for them so now they have to design the airframe and the engine.

Bombardier is an example of why new entrants should be concerned. As soon as you become a close threat, you don’t really trigger competition you trigger massive protectionism which forces them to sell the design to airbus, further consolidating the market

I think the incumbents would have to be broken up to seed any new competition that is remotely viable. The Boeing story has some way to go yet though, who knows

[freeopinion]

Obviously, selling 6 planes is not the end goal. But you have to sell 6 before you sell 600. Pre-selling an aircraft or two to a few shipping companies would pose a low risk investment to those companies, but provide a great lift for a struggling new hopeful. Look at how that worked for Rivian.

Your example of engines is an excellent point. Repeat that story 100 times to begin to understand the enormous difficulty. Which is to say, it won't be easy. I hope I didn't communicate that I thought it would be easy.

The story of Bombardier is maddening because it demonstrates that if you achieve unbelievably great things technically, you can still be assassinated by a million other attacks. The non-technical parts are what really seem to make this all a non-starter. But victory belongs to the bold.

And wouldn't it be a worthwhile ride to spend the next 20 years building incredibly cool stuff that eventually fails for whatever reason? Sign me up.

[borlanco]

This Asianometry video [0] explains why it is so difficult to develop and market new planes.

tl;dr The main obstacles are supply chain inefficiencies and that no one buys planes that aren't cost-effective.

[0] Japan's Commercial Jet Failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkmtrsE9Jfg