Posted on 03/02/2007 8:06:44 AM PST by lowbuck
Airbus has delayed dealing with its problems for years. Now it is being brutally restructured with factory sell-offs and massive job cuts. How could a supposedly model company like Airbus end up in such a crisis?
snip. . .
From the very beginning Airbus was a political construct and was at least partly intended to satisfy national egotism. And so two managers -- usually one German and one French -- were always appointed to the decisive posts in the company, as if the business partners mistrusted each other.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
"The investment bankers who helped with the negotiations still sigh at the labor pains and skirmishes that went on behind the scenes. A total of 10,000 pages of contracts went back and forth and even the French president interfered vehemently in the negotations."
This is what happens when you try to build a product by committee. It's the Concorde all over again. Socialist bureaucracies are incapable of learning from their mistakes.
They will never learn. Airbus should be allowed to expire. But that will never happen. The same disfunctional structure will be preserved, to mess things up over and over again.
This is a totally predictable outcome.
What must not happen, cannot happen...
Now a normal person would read that statement, and conclude that whatever effort or cost is necessary to make sure that what must not happen does not happen must be expended. But a weenie would read that statement and conclude that what must not happen must never be admitted to have happened.
That is the difference between function and disfunction.
Concorde allowed people to cross the Atlantic in two hours, something that passengers can't do today. Not sure this is your best discussion point.
Communists, trying to be capitalists. Can't work, they prefer control to productivity. See how well socialized medicine works? "I'm from the gummint, and I'm here to help you." Oh yeah.
Well that is what happens when you get the French involved. That was the biggest mistake IADs or whatever they call it made.
I will use the Panama canal as my prime example, they could not even build a ditch filled with water so how can you expect them to be able to build a giant albatross?
Concorde was never profitable. It ended up ferrying only the super-wealthy across the Atlantic and even then it couldn't turn a profit. The British and French governments had to subsidize it just to keep it in the air. That's why when problems cropped up, it went under. It's not an exact analogy, but it does show how inefficient bureaucracies are (especially socialist ones, see also the Trabant) when it comes to competing in the world of profits and losses.
From what I have read, the Concorde never made a profit. It was subsidized by their taxpayers to allow the rich to have another toy. This was all done in the name of "national pride".
Airbus may have made a profit in the past (and there are disputes about that), but it it going down the exact same road as the Concorde.
Actually, I think that it is a good example of what is happening.
Perhaps I should have said: A committee of English and French bureaucrats (or a UN committee). They don't exactly have a good track record of working together. There are always exceptions, but it does seem to be the rule.
And somehow they expect the EU to work.
And the thing they can't see is that Boeing's market share will grow larger than it ever could of if it had been faced with a couple of nimble German private companies, a couple of nimble French private companies, etc. Instead they go for the state-owned solution and get shellacked over the long haul.
Sometimes a machine can be a kludge even if it works well. The Concorde was like a Ferrari...if gas cost $25 an hour and the government took money from your neighbors to help you pay at the pump.
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