Originally Posted by
SonicFlyer
Secondly yeah, the manufacturers do actually ask the airlines what they need. They are not building hundreds of thousands or millions of planes like auto manufactuerers build cars. They are, at best, building a few thousand aircraft. The manufacturers build what the airlines want, and airlines don't want expensive jets that come with a lot higher costs.
This is accurate, the big airframers very much coordinate with customers to find out exacly what they need and want, then they try to design a plane which covers as many bases, to the greatest extent practical, for as many current and likely future customers as possible.
The very existence of the Max is testament to this... SWA said they'd buy many, many hundreds of them if it was common type with the NG. If Boeing did a clean-slate NB, it's widely understood that SWA would have considered airbus as an option since they would be forced into two fleets anyway.
There have been a very few cases where the manufacturers led from the front, driven by some vision of future opportunity and a desire to be first to market. Notably the A380, which was also a bit of a Euro d!ck measuring evolution vs. the 747. We know how that turned out, Billions $ down the drain.