'Gross management blunders' plague EADS

"The average jetliner is struck by lightning twice a year," columnist George Will writes of EADS in today's Washington Post. Airbus, he says, "has recently struck itself twice. The government-created European consortium decided to build the wrong aircraft, then built it badly."

Will looks at how the once-highflying EADS is now in a corporate freefall, with the market judging its "A350 inferior to the [Boeing] 787" and forcing "costly redesigns," and making "a bad $16 billion bet on huge demand for its A380, a double-deck superjumbo."

The A380, he says, has been plagued by "gross management blunders."