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Think youre having a rough day?

Try working at Airbus and coming to work to see this headline on your desk:

Emirates Air - The Largest A380 Buyer is considering its "Options".

Airbus has contracted to build 45 of the great flying beasts for Emirates with the contract saying that they will start to take delivery in 2007. Airbus has just announced that it will take another year to make delivery. Add to this bit of trouble and Airbus announcing that their aircraft in testing are way over the expected weight, meaning that the aircraft will never hits its efficiency targets. What is that old saying? If you owe the bank 1000 dollars, they own you, but if you owe the bank a million dollars, you own them!

Well, this is sort of like that. Only Airbus isnt just a company, its a collection of governments that act as the major stockholders in the Airbus corporation.

Now, I dont for a second think that Emirates Air is about to drop the A380, but they are about to make the contract much more to their liking and alot less profitable for Airbus. That means it will take more airframes to make the A380 line pay, which is very bad for Airbus, and thus potentially very bad for the French, the UK and Germany.

If Airbus were to suffer any more of these "surprises" with their customers, it will surely start to impact the governments of Europe in a very negative way.

Remember, options mean nothing until delivery and just to illustrate, Here's a list of companys who had "options" for the Boeing 2707 SST.

And when it comes to delivery, just remember before that happens, anything can and will happen. The A380 has to do two things to make the "line" pay off for the investors. First, actually make it to delivery, which has just proven to be harder than they had counted on. Second, the aircraft has to pay for the airlines that own it.

This first is likely, but the second is a long way from being proven to be true and its getting further away every day.

UPDATE: Sabotage? Who said anything about sabotage?

Snip...
"The new development comes in the wake of an investigation by Airbus on how three cables were cut on an A380 aircraft in the assembly line. But an Airbus spokesperson said there was no connection between the cable cutting incident and the reported delay in delivery.

Airbus spokeswoman Barbara Kracht confirmed the incident, first reported in the local newspaper La Depeche du Midi.

The three cables on the superjumbo were cut sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning, said Jacques Rocca, communications officer for Airbus France, a division of Airbus.

"What was found leads us to believe that this was more of a malicious act than an accident," Rocca said. "But the term 'sabotage' is strong and inappropriate."

The local newspaper had raised the possibility of sabotage. The A380 was being outfitted with electrical equipment. Rocca said the severed cables were discovered at the start of the workday on Friday morning. He did not indicate what the cables were for."

Posted @ June 14, 2006 12:37 AM | Current Affairs

Posted by: Duffy at June 14, 2006 05:27 AM

Posted by: BigFire at June 24, 2006 09:31 AM