Learning and Forgetting: The Dynamics of Aircraft Production

This paper studies commercial aircraft production, with an emphasis on the dynamics of production technology. Because commercial production is subject to many uncertainties not present in military production, the data presented here allows consideration of a richer set of hypotheses than was previously possible. In addition to learning, support is found for organizational forgetting, the hypothesis that he firm’s production experience depreciates over time, and incomplete spillovers of production expertise from one generation of an aircraft to the next.