Airbus crisis is a French farce

TheBusinessWeek.co.uk ^ | Jun 21 2006 | John Heffernan

[Paleo Conservative]

If you want on or off the aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail.

[RexBeach]

Big "Duh" Alert should be attached to this piece.

The Boeing Dreamliner will eat the BIG plane's lunch!

Good post!

[satchmodog9]

I wonder what the ratio is to Boing/Airbus mechanical failures.

[bkepley]

I wouldn't be bullish on the propects of any French stocks in the long term but I'm a pessimist I guess.

[Thermalseeker]

Big "Duh" Alert should be attached to this piece.

Yep. Hard to meet quotas and find the glory of high sales with a mandated 35 hour work week......

[xarmydog]

From what I have observed,I wouldnt fly on AIRBUST on a bet.Their rush to get this flying pig in the air will most certainly lead to shake and bake quality control.As the old adage goes,never buy a new vehicle,usually a new model,until the bugs have been corrected.I would not want to be one of the first passengers to find out!

[xarmydog]

Do they come with parachutes?!

[orionblamblam]

Mandatory:

[adorno]

Do they come with parachutes?!

Which reminds me....

Has anybody at Airbus or in the airline industry or in government circles given a thought about how big a nightmare it would be to try to go to the rescue of 550 to 800 passengers in case of a crash of the A380?

Airport terminals may be upgraded and runways may be expanded, but what about rescue efforts? What if the crash occurs far away from rescue capabilities?

Hey, I know that crashes occur now, but an A380 crash would be so much more scary.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

I saw a recently report on how the frieghter version of the A380 is having all kinds of problems as well.

The factory in Germany where it was supposed to be assembled and do take off and landing tests is in complete disarry. German environmentalists have locked up the construction of the assembly factories in court claiming the factory is built too close to river wetlands.
Airbus is now talking about scraping the whole facility and building it somewhere else.

[mvpel]

A Boeing 747-400 domestic model already has a capacity of 568, in two classes, and that's with American seat pitch.

I'll betcha Aeroflot could stuff 800 people in there:

[NavyCanDo]

"The Boeing Dreamliner will eat the BIG plane's lunch!"

Don't know if you are in the Aerospace industry, if you are you probably seen this. When Airbus was pounding their chest that they are now Number 1, and in that spot they were going to stay because of the A380 , there was a cartoon drawn from someone at Airbus floating around on the web that showed a A380 with shark teeth biting the tail off of a Boeing Dreamliner. Kind of Ironic that a couple of years later it is Boeing doing the biting. And I Love It.

[RexBeach]

Thanks for the great message!

My late uncle was an exec VP at Lear and at Grumman years ago. This makes me interested in such developments, but certainly not an expert!

[NavyCanDo]

Talk about cramming, in 1991 a El Al Boeing 747 airlifted a record-breaking 1087 passengers.

[patton]

what a nightmare.

[Paleo Conservative]

what a nightmare.

If I were an Ethiopian Jew, I'd rather take my chances flying in an overcrowded El Al 747 than let the jihadis get me.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Tails falling off planes again?

[patton]

Was that the case?

[Paleo Conservative]

Yes.