The Airbus A380 is down the tubes. That horror of the skies, able to whisk 800 plus passengers in one fell swoop from Paris to the Pacific at the cost of 200 tons of aviation fuel a time, is being grounded in France on the off chance that someone will perform a miracle and come up with a positive use for it, other than scrap.
Bad news for the workers at Airbus in St Nazaire where much of the fuselage of any of its planes has been made before being delicately transported to Toulouse where the final aircraft are put together.
In the rather longer idle hours that may well be theirs over the coming years, they can wander down to the shipyards of their city and look at another carbuncle on the backside of the modern age, the vast cruise liners constructed in the shipyards of the Chantiers de l’Atlantique, state-owned, at least partly, since the Popular Front days of 1936.
