It is certainly a candid admission of where the fundamental risk strategies employed by Airbus regarding the balance of design freeze versus production simply did not work out. Although the final customers may be commercially on the hook for some of the delays and cost generated by changing the specification or requirement after the freeze point, ultimately it is Airbus' name that gets the hammering and the shareholders who pay the price. Although Airbus have apparently relied on extensive use of Computer Aided Design and Manufacture, it is a salutary lesson that the realities of life are often more unpredictable or random than any computer modelling can be.