Legend has it that Concorde owed its svelte shape to the casual genius of a British boffin throwing paper darts from the top of a stepladder. What with repeated delays involving some € 4 billion in added costs and penalties, and now open warfare within Airbus’s politicised Franco-German management, the lumbering 550-seat A380 double decker currently looks more like a clumsy pan-European experiment to make elephants fly.

But over at Boeing, there is no time for gloating at its global rival’s problems. The superlight Dreamliner, Boeing’s long-distance answer to the prayers of passengers, has reportedly hit enough design and production issues to cause concern in the early stages of development. The truth is that there is nothing casual about designing or producing successful new airliners. It is an extraordinarily difficult and commercially risky thing to do. Modern airliners contain anything up to six million parts and involve dozens of subcontractors, making supply chains unbelievably complex. Technical problems, missed deadlines and frayed nerves are par for the course.

With the Dreamliner, Boeing has gone for outsourcing and prefabrication, making it arguably too dependent on forty-three main suppliers on three continents and creating huge problems of logistics and design control. The A380 problems, combined with the dusty reception given to the A350, Airbus’s half-baked riposte to the Dreamliner, indicate serious issues not only with design control, but with incompatible Franco-German management cultures. You cannot build these things by committee, particularly a Euro-committee riven with cultural misunderstanding and grievances.

The best-designed plane may fail, moreover, if the market a decade hence has been misjudged. Concorde fell victim to the soaring fuel prices of the 1970s. Airbus bet the bank, in the late 1990s, on a plane capable of carrying 550 or more passengers, a world record, between hubs from which travellers would transfer to their destination. Boeing gambled on a market for passengers prepared to pay a premium to travel in comfort for distances of up to 8,000 miles, 2,000 more than any comparable plane could fly non-stop, direct to their destination. Boeing’s bet currently looks better; buyers really want the Dreamliner whereas Airbus has sold only half the number of A380s needed to break even.

Three years ago Airbus had surpassed Boeing in sales volume and was boasting that European collaboration could outclass the best that America could produce. It is now back in the market for yet more taxpayer subsidies. This is ultimately a tale about more than aircraft. Boeing and Airbus symbolise the difference between markets in America and in continental Europe. Boeing grew organically from its small Seattle base. Airbus and Eads are political creations, the result of mergers designed by European governments to create “European champions”. When those champions start bickering with each other, inevitably there are broken bones, wounded pride and delayed contracts.