The Airbus problems I mentioned two weeks ago have gotten worse. According to this BizWeek article and this followup news item, executives at Airbus and EADS, its parent company, are getting the axe due to utter incompetence in keeping on top of the A380’s production.
[Airbus sales exec John] Leahy says that until this spring, managers on the plant floor downplayed the problem. “If you asked any one department, they’d say, ‘I’m a little bit behind, but we’re going to catch up,'” he says. But Airbus executives were concerned enough to ask the consulting firm of McKinsey & Co. in April to examine the problem. It was McKinsey’s report, in early June, that triggered the EADS announcement.Yet others say the situation is no surprise, because Airbus’s corporate culture openly discourages employees from alerting managers to potential problems. “If you tell them bad news, they simply don’t listen,” says Andrew Walker, a former top engineer at the factory in Broughton, Wales, where the A380’s wings are built. “No one dares tell a high executive that something isn’t possible, because he risks losing his job,” says a local union leader at the Toulouse factory who asked for anonymity.
That fear could explain why Airbus failed to grasp the severity of the problem sooner, even though the company had similar problems in the 1990s with long-range versions of its A340 aircraft.
Make mine Boeing.