There are reasons why the A380, B787, A350 and CSeries are late. Starting at the top.
Add the F111 to that list, because this isn’t a new phenomenon.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing? Britain lost out in the race for renewable technology because it adopted a bloated top-heavy approach to wind turbine research and design. The Danish had started making wind turbines in the late ’60s and ’70s (though the idea of generating electricity from the wind is older, adopted in the US during WW2). What they did was to build small turbines out of readily available materials, wait for them to blow down, then build them back up having learned a couple of lessons. In the UK we started out by trying to make the biggest turbine possible, with Taylor Wimpy providing the concrete body and various other stakeholders involved in various aspects of the design. A couple of these turbines were built on Orkney, laden down with sensors to monitor every single variable, a few of which I wager the Danish already understood very well. In the end one of the turbines developed structural cracks within a couple of years and all was forgotten. I remember seeing these things on Orkney when I was a child, but I understand they are long since demolished. Meanwhile the Danish were exporting turbines all over the world including the US whose own designs, such as those carpetting Altamont and the Tehachapi Pass, were inefficient and noisy.
I often hear that Germany exceeds in technology manufacturing because the managers and directors all could work a shop floor job. In my own line of work, IT (to put it vaguely), I had the pleasure of watching a director struggle to stick a MS Powerpoint presentation in ‘full screen’ mode. This is also the person we have to go to to get a port opened as part of our Firewall system, as if the director knows anything about ports…. The issue is that the director here is purely a director, and has been moved around businesses and our own business as a director rather than grow up through the company.
On a tengential note, some of my more anarchist-leaning buddies will suggest that this problem will get worse as more non-jobs are created leading to more top-heavy and bloated companies over time. They would argue that low unemployment is a negative thing and that in a post-scarcity society it is time to look beyond the concept that everybody has to work a non-job as part of a rigid working week, be it a sub-deputy-temporary-liason-management-coordinator for a company that sells printer paper or whatever. Food for thought.
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