Airbus A380 Woes Deepen
A third shoe has dropped. Airbus's A380 customers must now be wondering if the fourth shoe is going to drop.
UPDATE: We're approaching DEFCON 2 on the corporate disaster early warning system. This is likely the worst that could happen. Need I state the obvious...if you fail to sell a plane to a customer today, you'll be waiting 15 years before you can try again. I'm no airline industry guru, but I'd venture to say that if Boeing can pick off, say, 50 orders in each of the next two years for what would have been A380s, the A380 program will be go down as one of the most disastrous corporate projects of all time (and thus one of the largest government bailouts).
Note Correction: Sorry if I created confusion by originally saying we were approaching DEFCON 5. I thought 1 was normal and 5 was deep yogurt, but it is the other way around.
UPDATE: We're approaching DEFCON 2 on the corporate disaster early warning system. This is likely the worst that could happen. Need I state the obvious...if you fail to sell a plane to a customer today, you'll be waiting 15 years before you can try again. I'm no airline industry guru, but I'd venture to say that if Boeing can pick off, say, 50 orders in each of the next two years for what would have been A380s, the A380 program will be go down as one of the most disastrous corporate projects of all time (and thus one of the largest government bailouts).
Note Correction: Sorry if I created confusion by originally saying we were approaching DEFCON 5. I thought 1 was normal and 5 was deep yogurt, but it is the other way around.
posted by Donny Baseball at 12:25 PM
2 Comments:
It seems to me that the decision to build the A380 was the root of Airbus' problems. I am not sure to what degree that the strange structure of the company contributed to these problems. In retrospect, it should have never built the A380. I feel that it's bad management rather than bad structure that is sinking Airbus. Of course one can always argue that the structure led to a bad management team. But if that were true, then how can one explain the years that Airbus built superior aircrafts and took marketshare away from Boeing. The bottomline, in my opinion, is that Airbus gambled its future on the A380, and lost. Perhaps it was just bad luck.
Great point/question but we may never know the answer. Even if the A380 was built without a hitch it may or may not have succeeded. Clearly Airbus contemplated the high risk/high reward gamble reminiscent of Boeing's 747 which has become legend in business school case studies. Unfortunately Airbus doesn't have a history of pioneering profitably, what it is good at is fast following, or copying basically. It gives Boeing a real fight, but it didn't blaze trails in any of the airliner categories. Not being "self aware" in this respect is both a management and a structural defect. A purely profit-seeking Airbus might not have gone ahead with the A380 or it may have, but no doubt a government patronage mentality probably pushed it toward its decision to make the plane. Whether that was decisive also may never be known, but I think it was. Having decided to make the plane though, I am 100% convinced that the corporate structure is the source of the production problems.
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