Airbus is AWOL

Airbus’ A380 was late and over budget, so too is their military lifter, the much touted competition for the C-130J, the A400M.

Shares of EADS, based in Paris and Munich, fell as much as 5.1 percent, the most in 16 months. Delays to the A400M, designed to carry 116 paratroops or two attack helicopters, may lead to 1.4 billion euros ($2 billion) in charges and the bill could rise, the company said in a statement today.

Airbus, the world's biggest maker of commercial planes, may hand over the first A400M a year late after setbacks in engine development, EADS said Oct. 17. Airbus fell two years behind schedule with the A380 superjumbo at a cost of $6.8 billion and was forced to redesign its A350 model to win acceptance from airlines, pushing deliveries five years behind Boeing Co.'s 787.

“The charge for the A400M is higher than we expected,''

Initially, trolls dispensing the usual hatefulness on the word that the United States military put in orders for the A400M itself. Strange, how these people who are normally enjoy making a straw-man of some imaginary illuminati of the “the military-industrial complex” and suddenly get very nationalistic and hateful at the same time about “those evil corporations” run (no doubt) by greasy little men in top hats, and twirling their moustaches. As always, it turns out that this is only a philosophical bearing point when the greasy little men aren’t European.

You can almost see the constructivist Soviet posters of factory workers punching bolts in their dim little imaginations. Now if they would only “take one for the team,” get off of unemployment welfare, and get a job, they might have a point. For now, I guess they’ll hang their personal pride on people actually working and making something, that great shining attraction to peasants in the 19th century.

In any event, someone at DoD was smart enough to not want that albatross around their neck and that sale turns out to have been false, and tant mieux given that it’s over-budget and behind schedule.

Otherwise, to the lumpenproletariat mindset, it pays to screw up. The cities plants are situated in get to enjoy the time extension that the delay will require, bilking the tax-base for the privilege, and the moronic get to believe that the delay will serve the great cause of pacifism as an absurd defiance of a mysteriously hard to locate “arms lobby”, when it is far more likely that labor unions are pressuring European states to place orders for this thing.