"I Don't Want To See Flags In The Company"

A newly resurgent Airbus -- buoyed by recent orders for its A330 and upcoming A350 XWB -- is looking to stay that way, after suffering through a series of debilitating problems last year. Company president Louis Gallios recently said one way to avoid future strife, is to abandon the nationalistic management structure that has defined the planemaker since its creation almost 40 years ago.

"This is a completely new in Airbus," Airbus President Louis Gallois (above) said to reporters, according to Reuters. "I don't want to see flags in the company. We don't want to talk about Germany but Bremen or Hamburg; not France but Saint-Nazaire or Nantes. We have to create an Airbus spirit overcoming a national spirit."

That national spirit -- in which French and German sides of the aerospace consortium maintained an uneasy balance-of-power, sensitive to any shift in managerial weight between the two countries -- is blamed in part for last year's announcement of a second production delay for the flagship Airbus A380. French and German factories refused to use the same design software... and as a result, when the time came to install wiring inside the plane, routing holes did not match up between fuselage segments.

The resulting fallout from that delay -- including an ongoing investigation into insider trading rumors -- sent EADS stock tumbling. As ANN reported, that led to the announcement earlier this year of 10,000 job cuts at Airbus factories throughout Germany, France, Britain and Spain under the Power8 restructuring plan.

Relations between the French and German governments are also strained, though the situation seems to have improved in recent weeks. At this week's G8 summit in Germany, newly-elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed confidence his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, viewed the situation similarly -- adding the two leaders planned to visit Airbus headquarters in July, as a showing of unity.

"I am very happy to see we are on the same wave length on almost all subjects, notably bilateral issues," Sarkozy said. "She confirmed that she would come with me to the Airbus factories in Toulouse. That's very important, I think, to all Airbus workers."

Appealing to workers is one thing; the true success of such an endeavour, though, may lie with country chiefs at the planemaker.

Under the new power-delegation structure, they would see their jobs reduced to primarily representative roles, although they would still be responsible for union negotiations. Production would also be organized under four, cross-border themes, according to Reuters -- instead of being assigned on a per-country basis.

A new day may, in fact, be dawning for Airbus... but plenty of clouds from the old ones still loom. On Wednesday, German workers staged a series of wildcat strikes against the planemaker, in protest of Power8 cuts. Airbus also still needs to sell off all or part of six manufacturing plants.

Last month, EADS was also forced to defer plans to raise capital through the issuance of convertible bonds... as negotiating terms between all sides would have meant addressing deeper rivalries within the company.

FMI: www.airbus.com