A380 = White Elephant

Boeing and their home run called the 787 will bury Airbus soon.

French Frogs in charge?

What a joke

Airbus Management reminds me at lot of FAA Management(hehe)


PARIS - Airbus unions in France on Friday ordered a one-day
strike for next week to protest planned job cuts and plant
disposals at the European aircraft maker.

Shares of the parent company of Airbus, meanwhile, sank as
much as 5.2 percent in the wake of the disclosure that work
has been halted on the slow-selling freighter version of the
A380 model.

HAMBURG, Germany -- In Airbus' sprawling production plant
here, one of modern industry's biggest meltdowns, and the
dawning effort to set things right, is a tale of two
airplane-production hangars and two countries, Germany and
France.

Nearly 600 people should be hard at work in the key
production hangar here, where Airbus planned to assemble the
giant sections of the world's largest passenger airplane,
the A380. Instead, the quiet is broken only by music playing
softly on a stereo speakers that an employee sneaked in.
Only a few dozen employees tinker on eight airplane
carcasses that clog a production line that cost some $15
billion to develop.

The workers essentially are hand-building some of the
company's first two dozen A380s. Airbus' superjumbo jet
program was launched before Chicago-based Boeing's big hit,
the 787 Dreamliner, but the A380 now is two years behind
schedule, and the production delay will cost Airbus' parent
company, European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., $6.1
billion is operating profit over the next four years.

In Hangar 42 nearby, it is a different scene. Dozens of
aerospace engineers are in a mad dash to untangle the A380's
myriad of problems. They huddle in front of computer
terminals, set up on 15-foot-long folding tables, so they
can be in constant contact with workers in blue jumpsuits
who are investigating a hobbled A380. The workers,
confronted with bundles of wire that won't bend in the right
places and cables that come up short, explain the problems
to the engineers and urge them to design new ones. And quickly.

The design engineers are bogged down by computers that can't
talk to one another. One displays their work in
three-dimensional images, the other is strictly 2-D. The
breakdown fouls the effort to design a new part, get it
built and get the A380 back into full production.

The A380 line won't run full speed until 2010, if all goes
well. Biding their time until then, thousands of workers are
idle or on part-time shifts. Yet others labor furiously,
redesigning parts and installing them as they arrive, all in
the rush to get the A380 on track.

Workers in Hamburg and Airbus' other facilities have
worried, hurried and waited since the planemaker in October
announced that breakdowns on its A380 production line would
put deliveries of the new plane two years behind schedule.