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: the investigation as “a show trial and a piece of bad theatre”.

Soaring above it all

Mr Enders is adamant that nothing will deflect him from the task in hand, which is “to drive this company as far and as fast as possible in the direction of being a normal company. Aerospace is a political and strategic industry, but we need to make as much room as possible for business thinking and entrepreneurial decisions.” In practice, he says, that means both fixing the integration woes that beset the A380 and internationalising the company. “We will not survive as a non-integrated political plaything, and we will not survive as a mainly European company,” he adds.

Paradoxically, Mr Enders is himself a product of the nexus between politics and aerospace. Over his career he has moved seamlessly between academia, high-powered research institutes, politics and business. “Politics is structured chaos,” he says. “The political realm is not regulated by processes and manuals.” Unlike his fellow German collea-gues, most of whom had backgrounds in engineering or accounting, Mr Enders admits he quite enjoyed playing the political game at EADS, though he now sees it as destructive. But, it is precisely because of what he calls his “political fingertips” that Mr Enders thinks he is the man to get the politics out of Airbus—or, at least, to keep it at bay.