Not much different from what happened to airbus only a couple of years before.
Uhh, no. That had much more to do with the structure of EADS (the airbus parent) and how it's a joint company between multiple European countries. Notably France, Germany, Spain and the UK.
Airbus also had French / German co CEO's at that time, which didn't help decision making.
The problem stemmed from the fact that manufacturing is divided between various plants in various countries. Notably between Toulouse (France) and Hamburg (Germany). This is certainly not the same thing as outsourcing critical components to external suppliers (which I'm sure Airbus does too to a lesser extent).
Upon final assembly of the A380 in Hamburg they bungled the cabling which hit them back another six month or so. They where other problems of course, which there are always bound to be on such an ambitious project and with the (likely) unrealistic time scale for delivery.
The A380 was two years late, which is probably not bad for such a project. I wouldn't bank on it that the Dreamliner takes of in 2011. At least not commercially.
The airbus style big block integration actually worked quite well - engines from RR, undercarriage from airbus and wings from Mitsubishi all worked well.
The problem was that they eg. farmed out the avionics to mega corp, who farmed out the hardware to company A and software to B. Company B farmed out bits to company C and company D. Nobody realised that company D was a single contractor shop until they were late which went all the way up the chain.
There was an article on here at the time, Boeing literally couldn't find out the name of the company doing a vital part of the avionics software.
Hasn't Airbus always been some sort of multinational/EU-national plane manufacturer? I believe thats how it started as instead of a bunch of small enterprises siloed in each country they were pooling resources and talent to take on the American hegemony in aerospace.
