Airbus crashed this week. Not an actual airplane, but the stock price of its parent, EADS, which fell by almost a third yesterday, before recovering and posting a mere 26% loss in a single day, making it down a third this year. The most fascinating business battle in the world is getting a lot more interesting. 'Interesting,' as in the apocryphal Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times.'

In choosing le gloire of producing the world's biggest airliner, which will require many passengers to change planes in crowded hub airports, Airbus may have made a very bad bet. Bragging rights and the pride of seeing the biggest plane at the busiest of airports being their own product may cost Airbus, and the European taxpayers who guarantee the loans which financed the A 380's development, a lot of euros.

The theory behind the superjumbo project was that with landing slots at the busiest hubs like London Heathrow and Tokyo Narita strictly limited, more passengers per landing slot made sense. But just this week, problems with air turbulence caused by the behemoth bird may limit this advantage, as the International Herald Tribune reported:

...the International Civil Aviation Organization has set an interim rule that requires trailing airplanes to stay twice as far behind the A380 as behind other planes.