The dead hand cannot fly

From The American Thinker:

Yesterday, Airbus humiliated itself before the world civil aviation community. Already suffering a massive loss of credibility due to the repeated delivery delays for the A 380 super jumbo, the company was to have unveiled its recovery plan, dubbed Power8, consisting of restructuring and cost saving measures intended to save $2.8 billion per year by 2010.

Instead of triumphantly presenting Power8 to the world, the company admitted it could not come to an internal agreement on cost-saving measures, and word leaked out of heated arguments among the members of its board of directors. So much for boldly moving forward to solve its many problems. Airline customers cannot be comforted by the company's continued internal squabbling, the principal factor said to be at the root of the 380's repeated delivery delays.

The money supposed to be saved by Power8 is crucial to the survival of Airbus. With its cash flow languishing (undelivered 380s bring in no cash), and its cost structure inflated by the high value of the euro relative to the dollar, the company urgently needs the savings in order to have the funds necessary to develop the A 350XWB, a next-generation airliner needed to compete with Boeing's wildly successful 787 Dreamliner. The 787 has sold more copies than any other airliner in Boeing history at a comparable stage of development. Right now it has the market to itself, and the earliest Airbus could launch its competitor was said to be 2014 - prior to its de facto admission yesterday that it can't even yet agree on where to build it.

[. . .]

In the end, bureaucrats and governments being what they are, nobody is likely to want to see Airbus fail, and so French and German taxpayers are likely to be on the hook for even more billions of dollars. And American trade lawyers will be likely to stay busier than a Boeing factory launching trade complaints against European subsidies.

Do we need more proof that the dead hand of government poisons whatever it rests upon?