Marathon man

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: “I knew this was not going to be a sprint, but a marathon,” says Thomas Enders as he looks back on his first year as chief executive of Airbus—the firm that, with Boeing, holds a duopoly in the market for large civil aircraft. The emphasis Mr Enders puts on the long haul is calculated. When he took over, he was the fourth chief executive in little more than a year—a reflection of both the crisis that engulfed Airbus in June 2006 and the political in-fighting that had contributed to it. A former Bundeswehr paratrooper, Mr Enders is a fitness fanatic who climbs mountains, still enjoys the occasional parachute jump and likes to run half-marathons. So when he was given the chance to run Airbus, he says, he was sure he had the stamina and energy to go the full distance.

Last week, at the biennial Farnborough Air Show, the aviation industry had the chance to judge whether Mr Enders has the right stuff to give the planemaker the stability and strategic clarity it desperately needs. Some progress has already been made: for proof, note that Mr Enders is the sole chief executive at Airbus and reports to just one superior, Louis Gallois, the chairman of Airbus’s parent, the European Aeronautics Defence and Space company, or EADS. (EADS used to be lumbered with a dual-management structure, a legacy of its origin as a Franco-German joint venture.) But Mr Enders admits that much more must be done if he is to turn the technologically brilliant but politically dysfunctional firm into what he calls a “normal company”.

It was two years ago that the old Airbus finally ran out of runway. Plagued by power struggles within the core group of EADS shareholders as well as its bizarre governance, Airbus suffered when it admitted that deliveries of its new superjumbo, the A380, would be severely delayed. Shares in EADS tanked. The immediate cause was problems wiring up the huge aircraft, brought on by the use of incompatible software in the firm’s French and German factories. But the underlying reason for the mess was a hopeless lack of integration within the company.