Airbus Chief Enders Rides Flight-Jacket Swagger to EADS Top Job - BusinessWeek

[Ricky]

Airbus Chief Enders Rides Flight-Jacket Swagger to EADS Top Job - BusinessWeek

January 27, 2012, 7:03 PM EST

By Andrea Rothman

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Tom Enders, the German former paratrooper who leads Airbus SAS, loves to make a splash.

To show off the qualities of a military airlifter, he dived off the loading ramp at 10,000 feet. Disapproval of Germany’s abstention from the Libyan liberation campaign led Enders, 53, to quit Angela Merkel’s political party. Last year, he quipped that Boeing Co. executives might be a bunch of dope-heads.

The take-no-prisoners approach risks putting Enders, who was nominated yesterday to lead Airbus parent European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co., on a collision course with government shareholders. His challenge will be to harmonize disparate aviation and defense assets stitched together a decade ago, while answering to investors dominated by the industrial interests of Germany, France and Spain.

“Enders is hard boiled, no doubt about that,” said Michael Fuchs, the chief economy parliamentary spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democratic party. “He’s a straight talker who sometimes ruffles feathers, and he needs to be like that, to steer a ship between politics and a very complex business.”

Gallois, who is retiring, made his mark as a trouble- shooter for the French state, using diplomacy and often humor to ease conflicts at Europe’s biggest aerospace company. Gallois took the helm after EADS was rocked by multiple delays and cost overruns on the A380 double-decker that forced out his predecessor, Noel Forgeard, and depressed the stock price.

U.S. Push

Together with Gallois,


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