Tough on Airbus

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I feel for Germany. With France and Russia as best friends, one doesn't need any enemies. -- Wiley Horne, USA

It is sad to see an aviation project like the A380 suffer, but it suffers due to a misled strategy based on bringing France (Germany, and the EU as a whole) the glory of producing the "world's largest passenger plane." Surpassing the B747 in size, endurance, comfort, economy plus large hub-to-hub transport may have been justifications to the market, but the underlying motivations may just have been the challenge to feel the glory. We all remember the other major project, Concorde. It was built and flown not for profit, but for glory. Will the A380 be the EU's second Concorde? As it is already in flight test, it would be impossibly embarrassing to discontinue the A380 and focus long term on non-glorifying mid-sized (A350) and smaller jets (A32x). If governments were not stockholders in EADS it just might be possible to "bite the bullet" and cancel the A380, forget the glory and get to the business of making a profit. -- Rodney Lee, USA

Of course, the German government should get involved. These things are much too big to rely on the market and its sometimes quirky outcomes. -- Ed Mueller

Now we see the difference between a company like Boeing, which has to actually make a profit in the private sector to survive, and Airbus, which until recently could just build and sell its planes regardless of loss because sponsoring governments would simply make up the difference. Welcome to the market, Airbus. -- JL Ronish

The multinational Airbus company is a bureaucrat's heaven! A purge on wasted effort is long overdue. -- Ted, UK

I am surprised about the statement that the two year delay of the A380 is due to wiring problems and to the software learning process of said wiring task. The real problem lays, as it is even partially visible from your own articles, in other far more serious issues, such as extreme design mistakes due to a lack of organization "10 years or more" behind Boeing, lack of experience in very large aircrafts, a feuding multinational management and, last but not least, the political pressure of mainly the French government, blinded by its inferiority complex versus the USA. And if this possibly fatal mistake is compounded by abandoning the much larger middle-size market, already hurt by the ongoing A350 mismanagement, all the billions spent by the European governments in legal, but often illegal, subsidies to support sale prices below cost will be lost, and Airbus (will) enter history as one of the biggest flops recorded. -- Otto Tisch, USA