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: that customers had not been impressed with its proposed A350, a competitor for the fast-selling Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Mr Streiff promised a bigger, more technically advanced aircraft (with a much higher share of weight-saving composite materials in the airframe), but the return to the drawing board meant that the new A350 XWB would be five years behind the 787.

Mr Streiff lasted a hundred days, quitting after he concluded that the politicised EADS board would interfere with his own radical cost-cutting programme, known as Power8. After Mr Streiff’s stormy exit, the sophisticated and emollient Mr Gallois held the fort for several months before Mr Enders was finally appointed. Some saw it as a demotion, because he was stepping down as co-chief executive of the parent company. But Mr Enders disagrees. “It was the first time in my life that I was really prepared to fight to get a job,” he says. “I wanted it so much.” Because Airbus generates over two-thirds of EADS’ revenues, Mr Enders reasoned that the greatest contribution he could make was to help dig the firm out of the pit it had dug for itself.

The situation he inherited was, to put it mildly, mixed. On the one hand, a year of booming sales resulted in an order backlog by the end of 2007 of 3,421 aircraft—a 50% share of all large aircraft yet to be delivered. Deliveries of the A380 were about to begin and the revised A350, increasingly seen as more of a rival to Boeing’s 777 than the smaller 787, was gaining traction with customers. The Power8 restructuring plan, which included selling some factories in Europe to suppliers, was proceeding slowly, but with less union resistance than had been feared. On the other hand, there was no end in sight to the weakness of the dollar, the currency used to price commercial aircraft, which has become, Mr Enders says, “life-threatening” for Airbus.