Jens Flottau Jean Pierson "enabled Airbus Industrie to leverage its different national strengths and with his foresight and the different innovation capabilities, set our company on the path to success," Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said of the former leader of the European OEM.
Jens Flottau
In 1998, Jean Pierson walked out of his CEO office at Airbus’ Toulouse headquarters thinking he would soon be back.
Not in the same room, as that was going to be taken by his successor Noel Forgeard. But he would still be part of the team as an advisor working on the project that had dominated his professional life so far: bringing up Airbus. But Pierson, 58 years old at the time, returned only once for a brief visit many years later. He had closed the Airbus chapter in deep bitterness.
In hindsight, the 13 years prior were a formative period in the history of Airbus, strongly marked and guided by Pierson since 1985. Back then, in the 1980s, Airbus was a distant third in the commercial aircraft business behind Boeing and even McDonnell Douglas. The company had two aircraft models in its portfolio, the A300 and the A310, both mildly successful at best. The A320 was launched but not yet delivered. Towards the end of the 1990s and under Pierson’s leadership, not only was the A320 well established, but it was also enjoying strong sales. Airbus also had introduced the A321 and the A319 to the narrowbody market and the A330 and A340 widebodies. The A380 studies were progressing.
In 1995, former Airbus sales chief John Leahy had come up with the target to reach 50% of the market by 2000. Pierson, initially skeptic, soon came in strongly behind it.
Former Airbus CEO Jean Pierson and Virgin CEO Richard Branson. Credit: Antoine GYORI / Sygma / Getty Images
Leahy is one of just a few who stayed in touch with Pierson. They met once a year or so in Nice, where he had moved, for lunch or dinner. The two had a special relationship. “My career depended a lot on him,” Leahy says. It was Pierson who brought Leahy over from New York to Toulouse to run the sales organization in 1994. It was an unheard-of move, a break with Airbus tradition that would see top positions comfortably distributed among executives coming from the French, German, British and Spanish shareholders, roughly equivalent to the level of their industrial participation.
“It was all extremely political,” Leahy remembers. He also recalls Pierson saying many times that “I am not a politician”, a true self-assessment that would become important years later.
On the sales side, things went well. Leahy traveled the world to sell aircraft and Pierson made sure he was tuned in at all times. Pierson invited Leahy for a private lunch every week—including Pastis as an aperitif, a bottle of rosé wine and always steak frites as a main course—to catch up. “I never did a deal without having talked to him before,” Leahy says. Pierson’s role was not contract negotiations. As an industry heavyweight, he came in behind Leahy to support the credibility of Airbus’ production and customer support capabilities. “He was very good at that,” Leahy says.
The other big theme on Pierson’s agenda, connected to growing sales, turned out to be more difficult. Pierson was convinced that as Airbus became bigger it had to be more of a normal company. When he started, it was still a loose groupment d’interests economiques (GIE) where the shareholders controlled production, engineering, and development. Airbus itself was limited to selling and delivering the aircraft. In 1993, he gave a speech in Toulouse saying the GIE had “reached its genetic limits.” Pierson pushed for more integration, moving all the final assembly lines into an Airbus single corporate entity and away from the partners. He also wanted his own bigger engineering team that could at least better assess what the partners were doing, let alone perform its own design work. “He was more of an internationalist than anyone among the partners,” Leahy thinks.
Unsurprisingly, the shareholders did not like his views, as they meant they had to give up influence and privileges. “The partners were afraid of integration,” one long-time Airbus executive recalls. Most of the resistance came from Aerospatiale, ironically the shareholder that had sent Pierson to run Airbus. Given that it did not have a defense business unlike the British Aerospace and Germany’s Dasa, Aerospatiale’s leaders felt they had most to lose. The integration that Pierson had wanted and ultimately proved to be more than he had envisioned eventually did take place, but only many crises and many years later.
Some that knew Pierson well say he found it hard to put up with Airbus politics. He did not get along well with the German side, which had tended to send weak managers to Airbus for a long time. Pierson’s ego, charisma and knowledge were big—“no door was wide enough for him,” jokes a long-time associate. He was not always the easiest person on the planet to get along with. “But he was always straightforward and honest; I never had a problem,” says a former subordinate.
As much as he might have scared people at times, Pierson decided at some point that it was he who had to leave the CEO position—because he lacked the political skills to convince the shareholders of further integration. “Never in my life have I seen a CEO saying that he is not the right man,” Leahy says. “But Pierson did it.”
That he turned so bitter later had to do with the fact that he really did not want to leave completely. He saw himself as senior advisor to the CEO and the board. But Forgeard and Pierson did not get along—the new leader even stopped taking his phone calls. That was the end of it, almost. In 2005, Pierson returned one last time to an Airbus factory and was given a tour of the infamous A380 final assembly line during the initial production meltdown by then-CEO Gustav Humbert. “Gustav, you have a one-year delay,” Pierson told his former colleague after the walk. He was wrong. The A380 was two years late. The A380 drama shows how much someone like Pierson was missing. Initially strongly supportive of the project, later he told associates that he was no longer so sure. “He would have been pushing for caution,” Leahy is convinced. Born in 1940, Pierson became an aerospace engineer graduating from the Institut Superieure de l’Aeronautique et de l’Espace and joined Sud-Aviation as a production engineer in 1963. He later held positions at Socata and ran the civil aviation division of Aerospatiale before being promoted to the Airbus job. Jean Pierson passed away Nov. 3 at age 80.
Jean Pierson, Nov. 17, 1940-Nov. 3, 2021 Credit: Airbus
