AIRBORTION (via Kevin Whited):

The Airbus saga: Hubris and haste snarled the A380 (Nicola Clark, December 11, 2006, International Herald Tribune)

Beginning in the summer of 2004...large sections of the plane's forward and rear fuselage had been arriving unfinished from Airbus's other main A380 production site in Hamburg. By the late autumn, a team of around 200 German mechanics was in Toulouse along with several hundred kilometers of electrical cables to be installed in the first planes. But after weeks of painstakingly threading thousands of veins of copper and aluminum wire around the walls and floor panels of the airframes, the teams had run into a maddening snag: the cables were too short.

"The wiring wasn't following the expected routing through the fuselage, so when we got to the end they weren't long enough to meet up with the connectors on the next section," said one German mechanic, who said he arrived in Toulouse in early 2005. He asked not to be identified out of fear that he might lose his job. "The calculations were wrong," he said. "Everything had to be ripped out and replaced from scratch."

Throughout the autumn of 2004, assembly line managers duly reported the problems at the plane's regular progress review meetings. But no one, at that stage, seemed to believe they were significant enough to merit a red flag to top management.

"It doesn't matter if it's short by 40 millimeters or 40 meters," said Tom Williams, chief of aircraft programs at Airbus.

One such miscalculation, or even several, do not amount to a problem, he argued, and were natural given the mammoth task of building a 555-seat flying machine. "But after a while it becomes a cumulative problem."

Airbus did not acknowledge that "cumulative problem" until almost six months after Chirac spoke. It was not until June 1, 2005, that company executives made their first public admission of manufacturing troubles and announced a six-month delay in the plane's delivery schedule.

In what would become a pattern, the bad news at Airbus was delayed, diminished and downplayed.

"People were in denial," said John Leahy, the chief salesman for Airbus.