Asking ourselves Existential Questions

Less than 40 years ago, Asian cars were not what many people across the world would like to buy, for different reasons: lack of reliability, prejudges…Since then, the Japanese innovation has contributed to dethrone European and North American automotive industry, with a lot of damages in term of jobs in our countries.

The odds are that in about few decades, the business competition for commercial aircraft and business jets between Asia and the rest of the World Aerospace Industry, will be very hard. Consequently, as what happened in automotive industry, some keys players in Aerospace industry might not survive. Only will survive the Aerospace business mostly destined for innovation.  Innovation takes its primary source from business decision maker’s vision. The Golden Eagle flies at higher altitude than other birds do, so that it can watch the horizon skyline, and attack easily any prey, regardless of the distance. As for the other birds, they can only see preys within reach, because they fly at low altitude. Therefore, when food becomes scarce, most of the birds become more vulnerable than the Eagle.

In mid-50, Lockheed Super Constellation with its four propellers was one of  very famous commercial aircraft interconnecting Europe to USA in about 14 non stop flight hours . Boeing who also had propellers at that time decided to think about jet plane, but Lockheed did not follow: then came out the legendary  Boeing 707 that was the first only commercial aircraft that could interconnect Paris (France) to New York in early 60s for no longer than 8 hours. The 707 became a kind of laboratory plane from which came out the 747, 727, 737 etc. Boeing took the lead of the business with deep consequences for other US competitors who could not follow.

New technology always raises high technical challenges, and a Business with strong skills in Innovation can easily give trust and assurance to his customers, mainly when they know that, highly qualified and knowledgeable people are on charge of related activities. Indeed improvising can put the business at risk.

Innovation requires recognizing the intellectual power of the Knowledge; promoting the Knowledge, and investing in talented people, and laboratories. Exceptionally knowledgeable people in their domain have the intellectual authority to attract other talented and knowledgeable people (no matter where they leave) and hire them    in their business without preconceptions.

Finaly, leadership in Industry comes with the ability to complete or built faster and right (with zero or very minimum mistakes),   a new technology or a new product that could requires a lot of time to the competition.  The secret relies on the fact that you already looked deeply the subject, while the competition is still approaching it.

Today Infinity cars, Hondas, Lexus and other Asian cars are the one populating the more most of the cities across the World, in comparison to Legendary American or European cars; the main reason appears to be the lack of vision of some decision makers in automotive industry who could have anticipated this situation and be well prepared for the competition.

What about aviation industry in the coming decades?