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Airbus announced another delay to the production schedule of its flagship A380 jet yesterday, putting it on the hook for more penalty payments to airlines already angered by a two-year-delay to the superjumbo programme.
The company announced that instead of delivering 13 planes this year, it would deliver 12, and that it would fall four planes short of its target of 25 next year.
Previous delays to the massive programme sank the company into loss in 2006, prompting a major restructuring at the group and its parent, EADS.
Tom Enders, the chief executive of Airbus, declined to quantify what the financial impact might be for the group, saying that would be determined over the next several weeks through "discussion with individual airlines".
He added: "As the [chief executive] of Airbus, I clearly regret this very much. We are struggling with this big programme."
Instead of the 45 planes previously forecast to be built in 2010, the company said yesterday that it could reliably say that it will produce between 30 and 40 A380s, which have a list price of US$300m.
Mr Enders denied that the latest setback, the fourth time the company has had to rejig its production plan for the double-decker jet, dented Airbus' credibility among its customers. "Let me be clear.
Airbus is certainly not endemically unreliable," he said. The delay was due to the company's underestimation of the resources and time required to build the "wave one" aircraft, which require more manpower before the "wave two" aircraft are moved into a more automated production line.
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