Despitebulging order books, the mood at Airbus and Boeing is far from celebratory.Both aviation giants are moaning loudly that their production systems andsupply chains are flawed, albeit for ostensibly different reasons. This weekLouis Gallois, the boss of EADS, the Franco-German aerospace consortium thatowns Airbus, added substance to warnings a week earlier by the planemaker’s chief executive, Tom Enders,that the dollar’s decline was "life-threatening" for the firm. Mr Gallois saidit was no longer just a possibility that Airbus would have to move a large partof its production to "the dollar zone" or low-cost countries, but acertainty.

Airbus isalready in the middle of Power8, a big restructuring plan that involves theloss of 10,000 jobs and the sale of several plants, which is meant to offsetthe losses caused by the delays in delivering the A380 superjumbo. But Power8assumed that a euro was worth $1.35, not today’s $1.47. Mr Gallois estimates thateach 10-cent rise in the euro costs Airbus