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280 CHAPTER 8 • PRoduCT And sERviCE dEvEloPmEnT And oRgAnisATion

June 1993 – Boeing decides not to go for a super-large passenger aircraft, but instead to focus
on designing smaller ‘jumbos’. Airbus and its partners set up the A3XX team to start the ‘super-
jumbo’ project.

1996 – Airbus forms its ‘Large Aircraft’ division. Because of the size of the aircraft, it is decided
to develop specially designed engines rather than adapt existing models.
2000 – The commercial launch of the A3XX (later to be named the A380).
2002 – Work starts on manufacturing the aircraft’s key components.

February 2004 – Rolls-Royce delivers the first Airbus engines to the assembly plant in Toulouse.
April 2004 – The first Airbus wings are completed in the North Wales factory. London’s Heath-
row Airport starts to redevelop its facilities so that it can accommodate the new aircraft.
May 2004 – Assembly begins in the Toulouse plant.

December 2004 – EADS, the parent company of Airbus, reveals the project is €1.45 billion over
budget, and will now cost more than €12 billion.
January 2005 – Airbus unveils the A380 to the world’s press and European leaders.
27 April 2005 – The aircraft makes its maiden flight, taking off in Toulouse and circling the Bay
of Biscay for four hours before returning to Toulouse. A year of flight-testing and certification
work begins.
June 2005 – Airbus announces that the plane’s delivery schedule will slip by six months.

March 2006 – The plane passes important safety tests, involving 850 passengers and 20 crew
who safely left the aircraft in less than 80 seconds with half the exits blocked.
July 2006 – The A380 suffers another production delay. Airbus now predicts a delay of a further
six to seven months. This causes turmoil in the boardrooms of both Airbus and EADS. The
company’s directors are accused of suppressing the news for months before revealing it to share-
holders. It leads to the resignations of Gustav Humbert, Airbus’s chief executive, Noel Forgeard,
EADS’s co-chief executive, and Charles Campion, the A380 programme manager.
October 2006 – Airbus infuriates customers by announcing yet a further delay for the A380,
this time of a whole year. The first plane is now forecast to enter commercial service around
20 months later than had been originally planned. The delays will cost Airbus another esti-
mated €4.8 billion over the next four years. The company announces a drastic cost-cutting
plan to try to recoup some of the losses. The Power8 programme is intended to ‘reduce costs,
save cash and develop new products faster’. It wants to increase productivity by 20 per cent and
reduce overheads by 30 per cent.
October 2007 – The super-jumbo eventually takes off in full service as a commercial airliner
for Singapore Airlines. It wins rave reviews from both airlines and passengers – even if it is two
years late!
So what caused the delays? First, the A380 was the most complex passenger jet ever to be built.
Second, the company was notorious for its internal rivalries, its constant need to balance
work between its French and German plants so that no country had too obvious an advan-
tage, constant political infighting, particularly by the French and German governments, and
frequent changes of management. According to one insider, ‘the underlying reason for the mess
we were in was the hopeless lack of integration [between the French and German sides] within the
company’. Even before the problems became evident to outsiders, critics of Airbus claimed that

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