Subsidies aside, Airbus as an organization has executed extremely well. For instance, I remember in the 90s how Boeing said distributing manufacuring amongst many sites was the reason Airbus was loosing money, yet now in the 20xxs Boeing is doing the same thing!
I think you take it as a given, if there were no subsidies and no Concorde that there would be no Airbus, but I feel that given the presence of so much talent and experience in Europe, there still would be something like Airbus competing today. It wasn't like there were no airplanes being manufactured in Europe before Concorde. It just so happened that the tradition of government aid was there [just like the government got itself into the automobile business, etc] so they took advantage of it. I'm sure if Boeing could get the same kind of support it would take it too.
It seems that everyone feels Boeing should be embarassed about the fact that the Sonic Cruiser and the various 747 follow-ons have not gone forward. To me it shows they are working with their customers to gauge how viable a product is before they commit to it, and by necessity that happens in the public domain. They have found there was not a market for these products. That's life. I don't think they should be embarassed for trying. Should Airbus be embarassed that all its attempts so far to sell a downsized A330 to replace A300 have failed? No, they just pick themselves up, and pitch the A350, trying to find a good match between what they can build and what the customer will buy.
You seem to equate the failure of Sonic Cruiser and Concorde, yet all that was lost in Sonic Cruiser was the cost of a lot of paper, and the salaries of product development people who were were going to be paid anyways. And that money came from Boeing, not the taxpayers. In the case of Concorde, major amounts of money were lost, and the taxpayers footed the bill.
In the case of the Sonic Cruiser, I think it was a case that the airline market went from boom to bust just as they were pitching the product. It failed, and it's a good thing it failed before the big bucks were committed. I wonder what would have happened if someone offered to loan Boeing one third of the cost of developing Sonic Cruiser, and told them they didn't have to pay any of it back till if and when they sold 400 airframes, and then only had to pay it back as a royalty on each airframe, after they had been paid for each airframe. Depending on the timing of events we could have seen a Sonic Cruiser get built and then be a massive financial failure. And depending on events, we may see A380 be the same. I don't believe this is so (I think A380 with time will be a success) but on the other hand it's not too hard to think of a few scenarios where it will fail. And a large part of this risk of failure is being underwritten by European taxpayers.
--ev--