Airbus suffered a double blow on Tuesday as airlines warned they faced further delays on delivery of the A380 superjumbo and a new hitch developed with the plane maker's cost-saving plans.
Dubai airline Emirates, the biggest A380 customer, and Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways, both said they had received warnings of delivery delays on the world's largest passenger airliner -- which is already two years behind schedule.
Airbus confirmed that chief executive Tom Enders had written to all A380 customers telling them production had reached a critical phase. It announced a "major review" of A380 production last week.
Separately, in Toulouse, French unions claimed victory in their battle to stop Airbus from selling some factories -- a plan that is part of a major restructuring and job-cutting exercise.
The A380, which went into service last year with Singapore Airlines, is heavily bankrolled by state-owned Emirates, which has ordered 58 A380s.
"This will do us serious damage," Emirates President Tim Clark said.
Deliveries of the A380 have fallen behind schedule after a series of industrial problems since 2005. The reputation of Airbus parent firm EADS is seen at stake as it strives to deliver 13 planes this year.
Emirates, the largest Arab carrier, hopes to receive five A380s before the end of March 2009 and another 12 in the year to March 31, 2010. Clark said he will find out in the next two to three weeks whether that schedule is intact.
A spokesman for the Abu Dhabi government-owned carrier, Etihad, said it too had received a letter from Airbus indicating that there may be a delay.
Etihad has ordered four of the USD$300 million, 525-seat planes.
Europe's biggest single industrial project first faced problems in 2006, when A380 sections reached the French assembly plant with wiring flaws that caused production to halt.
Airbus blamed the failure of German and French plants to use the same design software, and was forced to start assembling the first 25 planes by threading the 500 km of wiring through each aircraft manually, pushing deliveries back on average 2 years.
In a separate development on Tuesday, unions and industry sources in France said plans to sell two factories to attract investment in new lightweight airframe materials were showing signs of unravelling. The news follows the collapse of talks to sell some factories in Germany.
The potential double setbacks highlights the internal and external pressures squeezing Airbus parent EADS as Europe's largest aerospace firm tries to hold together its production system while resisting the global financial crisis.
A380 production problems are a legacy of internal rivalries, which until recently prevented French and German factories developing a common system for wiring the double-decker jet, hurting political pride in Europe's biggest industrial project.
The factory sales were forced on Airbus by pressure from a relentlessly weak dollar, and have been blown off course by another global financial storm, the meltdown in credit markets, which has made it harder for potential buyers to get hold of funds.
Problems with the factory sales have raised questions over the planemaker's next project, the EUR10 billion euro mid-sized A350, as Airbus struggles to crank out the A380.
Emirates is also the largest single buyer to date of the A350.
Airbus is trying to reconcile the demand for engineers to fix the A380 delays and cope with bulging industry order books with growing pressure to cut costs in the face of a weak dollar.
The restructuring plan involves 10,000 job cuts and EUR2.1 billion of savings by 2010, as well as factory sales in France, Germany and Britain.
The group is in talks to sell 2 plants to Latecoere, a French supplier of fuselage parts and doors. Key to the success of the plan is the ability to outsource costly A350 research.
In March Airbus called off talks to sell three German plants to MT Aerospace, blaming the strong euro. It is also in talks to sell a British plant to GKN.
Unions officials who asked not to be identified said EADS had been forced to back further away from the factory talks due to concerns over the availability of funds.
Latecoere acknowledged changes in the way Airbus wanted to proceed but denied it had any fund-raising problems.
