Ben Katz

speaker

144 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 3d ago

Ben Katz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ What’s News · Flying Into the Future: How Will AI Reshape the Aviation Industry? · 26 Jul 2026 podcast

As you say, Luke, the industry is really battling with a number of things.

At the moment, we're dealing with record high fuel prices, which is weighing on airlines, a lot of disruption, a lot of geopolitics.

But even at an industrial level, if we go back 30, 40 years, competition was something that was more rife back then than it is now.

We used to have three, four different airframers all kind of competing, giving airlines a lot more choice than they have now.

At the moment, we have a duopoly, right?

We have Airbus and Boeing that, for the most part, dominate the sale of

big commercial aircraft to airlines.

Part of that problem is just simply the technological hurdle and the associated cost of how much money it takes to develop a new aircraft.

And that's really kept out new entrants.

Bombardier is a good example.

The now A220, that was an independent aircraft that, you know, fell into hard times and was snatched up by Airbus.

That was an attempt to kind of break the duopoly.

But the promise of AI maybe, you know, lowers the burden of that threshold a little bit.

We'll see, though.

Absolutely.

I mean, manufacturing delays is something that has been plaguing the industry since even before the pandemic.

Coming out of the pandemic, suppliers have really been struggling to keep up, to meet the aggressive ramp-up schedules, a lot of frustration out there from airlines that they can't get their planes.

And then, of course, there's just the fact that the planes that are being built, a lot of questions around quality of those aircraft that are coming out.

Obviously, Boeing in particular has faced a lot of challenges in that space over the last few years with the 737 MAX and more recently with the 777X.

And there's an irony here because...

Showing 41–60 of 144 · page 3 of 8