Airbus Industrie was formally set up in 1970 following an agreement between French and German companies and joined by a Spanish company in 1971. Each company would deliver its sections as fully equipped, ready to fly items. It was a fairly loose alliance but that changed shortly after major defence mergers in 2000. DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (German), Aérospatiale-Matra (French) and CASA (Spanish) merged to form EADS. In 2001 BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace) and EADS formed the Airbus Integrated Company to coincide with the development of the new Airbus A380 which will seat 845 passengers and be the world's largest commercial passenger jet.
At this time Airbus was effectively an example of industrial cooperation across Europe, the company employs around 57,000 people at sixteen sites in four European countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Final assembly production occurs at Toulouse (France) and Hamburg (Germany), and the group opearates with two Co-CEO’s one French and one German and two Co-Chairman (Lagardere and Bischoff).
But this system has met its limits, years after years a lot of internals problems have pilled up and the announcement of a further delay in the delivery of its A380 have revealed the bad situation of Airbus. Today the problems of EADS (parent company of Airbus) are an object-lesson in the dangers facing a company when government lacks a coherent industrial vision.
Since its conception the EADS management structure has respected the political arrangement for control of the group whereby French and German executives and traditionally the workforce at the aircraft manufacturer is geographically distributed in proportion to national ownership stakes. It is hard to make sense of this from the point of v ...