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Customers are complaining about outmoded or lacking models, and top managers are blanketing each other with accusations and legal complaints. As long as business ran smoothly, outsiders heard little about blunders or family feuds. But those days are over as of last Tuesday -- even if the sources of Airbus' trouble are small but still important parts like cables and the plane's electrical systems.
The electrical systems are needed to provide juice for the A380's elaborate lighting and entertainment systems. But they've hit a supply bottleneck -- they're not always available in sufficient numbers or the proper quality. Airbus had similar problems a year ago, but apparently they haven't been solved.
Now colossal, half-built airplane carcasses wait in assembly halls in Toulouse and Hamburg. They'll have to be retrofitted by special emergency teams working by hand. And aviation experts wonder how Airbus will fill its enormous backlog of orders -- valued at €250 billion -- and still develop new models, if just assembling the A380 seems to be overwhelming managers and engineers.
Spokespeople for Airbus and EADS have been trying to play down this series of production failures. Technicians were working hard to get the problem under control; customers kept changing their orders for different planes that required different, and sometimes longer, cables. And by the time the problem came to a head, management had been informed too late. These facts may all be true, but they only tell half the story.
As if that weren't enough, the EADS and Airbus managers will have to answer a few uncomfortable questions to the French stock-exchange supervisory authority. Majority stockholders DaimlerChrysler and the French media company Lagardère sold 7.5 percent of their shares only a few weeks before the latest production bottleneck was announced -- for a good price.
Both corporations deny they knew about the crisis, but high-ranking EADS managers have said privately that delays with the A380 were being discussed in early April. Even Forgeard has fallen under suspicion by stockholder watchdogs and politicians, because in mid-March he sold options and stocks bought in his childrens' names to the tune of several million euros. He resolutely denies misusing insider information.
This series of scandals has alarmed the chairman of the board, French media entrepreneur Arnaud Lagardère, son of the late EADS co-founder Jean-Luc Lagardère. With income from the investment in EADS, Lagardère wanted to strengthen his media empire, which consists of numerous magazines as well as TV and radio broadcasters. But now, with his co-chairman, former DaimlerChrysler board member Manfred Bischoff, he has to worry about airplane manufacture.
Continue Reading online at Der Spiegel International (English)
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