I worked for Airbus a long time ago, and obviously I have some rose-tinted glasses, but what stands …

Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different. I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking. The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking. This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations. It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things). The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."

> I don’t think Airbus could have happened as a purely French or German project Cf Arianespace.

How would you say their cultures compliment each other? I would be interested to hear more concrete, and especially how it ends up when you mix them.

I have met many former Airbus engineers and former Airbus contractors. Every single time I have heard nothing but bad things about the company. Sure, selection bias, but everything I heard is exactly what I would expect from a large corporation, split across a continent at its worst. Long, tedious decision processes which are completely opaque together with a culture, where management sees it as their responsibility to create a large bureocratic processes to navigate the extremely challenging landscape, where culture and geography clash. Mind you these are complaints from people still working in Aerospace. In general I have always had terrible experience the more diverse and intercultural Teams got. The best teams I experienced are homogeneous, ideally only including people from a small geographic region, with very similar sensibilities. Even inside a nation regional sensibilities can be…

That started before airbus. People forget that Aerospatiale (a founder of airbus) was a partner in Concord (aka Concorde). That is where cross-boarder aerospace really got started. Many saw such partnerships as key to keeping Europe together politically. Without Concorde-Airbus, europe might have looked very different.