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The French are also briefing journalists that bumbling German Airbus engineers still use pen and paper because they are uncomfortable with computers.

“Airbus teams assured us that the timetables would be respected,” M Forgeard said in a clear attempt to blame Herr Humbert. “They were even claiming that in May.”

In public, German executives have retreated into silence. But privately, they are thought to be seething at the perceived arrogance of a country that is supposed to be their closest partner.

The magazine Der Spiegel caught the mood when it said the crisis had reopened Franco-German hostilities.

Berlin is pointing the finger at M Forgeard, a pure product of the Parisian political and business establishment.

He was President Chirac’s industrial adviser in the 1980s, and it was M Chirac who used the French state’s 15 per cent stake in Eads to impose him as joint chief executive last year.

M Forgeard immediately tried to overturn Eads’s traditional management structure — with one French and one German chief executive — and take overall control himself.

But Germany’s private sector shareholders were outraged at the conduct of a figure seen as instrument of France’s invasive state. They refused his demand and designated Thomas Enders as joint chief executive. Herr Enders’s brief was to keep watch on M Forgeard.

But if the French manager’s methods irked his German colleagues, analysts say his vision was probably right.

Eads and its subsidiary, Airbus, were designed to maintain a delicate political balance between France and Germany, with power shared equally. But the result is cumbersome, with dual decision-making processes and factories spread across Europe.

Airbus’s ambition for the A380, a plane supposed to carry up to 840 passengers and dwarf its rivals from Boeing, has illustrated the shortcomings.

But the man who first pinpointed them, M Forgeard, appears too blunt and too impatient — in short, too French — to work with the likes of Herr Enders to resolve them. French commentators say he will need luck, and the continued support of M Chirac, to keep his post.

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