Despite bulging order books, the mood at Airbus and Boeing is far from celebratory. Both aviation giants are moaning loudly that their production systems and supply chains are flawed, albeit for ostensibly different reasons. This week Louis Gallois, the boss of EADS, the Franco-German aerospace consortium that owns 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 said it was no longer just a possibility that Airbus would have to move a large part of its production to "the dollar zone" or low-cost countries, but a certainty.

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