Originally Posted by
Organfreak
Come on, Dozy, you know the answer as well as anyone. Because it is entirely realistic. It does its job, it works.
Until it doesn't (just because it hasn't gone wrong yet doesn't mean it won't). One of the things I used to find amusing about the A v B debate were the B people who swore up-and-down that Boeing's latest models weren't entirely computer-reliant, and the presence of the moving yokes proved it.
Great Jumping Jehosaphat! That is so disingenuous I forgot to sneer. MD merged into Boeing. That pretty much took care of the rest of the competition.
They'd overhauled the ailing MD by the early-mid '90s. In any case the point still stands, because the MD/Boeing merger would have produced a company that consistently outsold Airbus year-on-year if Airbus themselves hadn't done something about it.
[EDIT : I'm sure I've said this before, but as an aside, I wonder what would have happened if Boeing had elected to shrink the 757 rather than stretch the 737 for their (then) next-gen narrowbody. ]