Weep not for Britain’s stake in Airbus, but watch what happens to BAE

Let’s not come over all emotional about the sale of BAE Systems’s one fifth stake in Airbus to EADS, the Franco–German group that already owns the rest of it. For a start, the sale does not portend the death of a once-great industry, because Britain has not had much to be proud of in civil aircraft manufacture since before the second world war. The last all-British commercial aircraft any of us flew in was probably a modest BAe 125, but the division of the then British Aerospace that made it was sold to Raytheon of the US in 1993, and its successors are built in Wichita, Kansas. If you are luckier than me, you may have flown with the glitterati in the Anglo–French Concorde, a thing of beauty but a financial disaster and a commercial albatross; and if you are older than me, you might have experienced the luxuries of the de Havilland Comet — but not, I hope, one of the early-1950s models that suffered catastrophic metal fatigue.