By Carol Matlack, BUSINESSWEEK - - John Leahy, the American-born chief salesman for Airbus, is rarely heard to utter a discouraging word. But when Leahy was asked, over coffee in his office this week, to discuss the turmoil enveloping Airbus, his response was blunt: "The facts speak for themselves. This is a major screwup. It's an embarrassment, the worst I can remember in 22 years" with the company.

Indeed, Boeing's European archrival faces an unprecedented crisis. Shares in its parent, European Aerospace Defence & Space, tumbled 26% on June 13, when the company disclosed production delays on Airbus' A380 megajet that will slash $2.5 billion in profits from 2007 to 2010.

Under fire
Stock market regulators are investigating Noel Forgeard, the EADS co-CEO who ran Airbus from 1998 until last year, because he and his family exercised millions of dollars' worth of stock options less than two months before the delays were made public. Airbus' carefully cultivated image as a pan-European company has been tarnished by nationalistic finger-pointing, with some in France blaming German factories for the A380 problems, and vice-versa.

DaimlerChrysler has stock in EADs