Crash casts shadow over Airbus' military transport aircraft

Airbus and its A400M Fernando Alonso, head of Airbus's military aircraft unit, will pay tribute to colleagues who died at the weekend in the crash of an A400M transport aircraft by acting as flight test engineer on the next carrier to leave the hangar on Tuesday.

It is Mr Alonso's way of quelling questions about the future of one of the European aerospace group's most troublesome aircraft programmes, and demonstrating to the A400M's government customers that production will continue as planned until more is known about what caused the accident.

This is the first time Airbus has lost an A400M, and the crash has cast a shadow over Europe's largest single defence contract - a €20bn programme dogged by difficulties since its inception more than a decade ago. The aircraft is already almost four years behind schedule, and billions of euros over budget, and the crash could lead to further delays if remedial adjustments have to be made, analyst say.

Investigators were still trying to decipher what went wrong on Saturday when the A400M due to be delivered to Turkey came down in a field outside of Seville just minutes after taking off on a test flight.

According to people close to the investigation, the crew reported a technical difficulty, issued a Mayday distress call and the four-engine aircraft crashed all in a matter of minutes. Four of the crew died, and two were badly injured.

Der Spiegel reported in its online edition that the A400M suffered multiple engine failure. The Rolls-Royce-led consortium responsible for making the engines referred questions to Airbus, which declined to comment beyond saying it would await the results of the crash inquiry.

Only investigators will be able to say whether the fault lay with the aircraft, its engines, the crew who flew it, or was the result of a unique and tragic chain of events.

New delays with the A400M programme would stretch the patience of the aircraft's seven original launch customers to the limit. Etienne Schneider, Luxembourg's defence minister, told local media on Monday he would examine whether delivery of the Duchy's aircraft could be cancelled, although he also added that it was likely to be too costly to renege.

So much has already been poured into the A400M programme that the countries who backed its development in 2003 - Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Turkey - are likely to be reluctant to see it cancelled.

"It has been a very costly exercise but the French, Germans and British need its capability," says Howard Wheeldon, an analyst.

Even Germany's defence ministry, which has been highly critical of the A400M programme, described the aircraft on Monday as "very important".

But the multinational nature of the aircraft's development and its pioneering technology combined to create a programme that at times appeared to be on the brink of collapse. With seven governments all demanding customised systems for the aircraft "we were building seven different aircraft", one Airbus executive said recently.

Political interference did not stop there. Airbus chose a US company, Pratt & Whitney, to develop the groundbreaking turboprop engines to power the aircraft, but partner states insisted on the European consortium led by Rolls-Royce.

Airbus, unaccustomed to building military aircraft, also made its own fundamental error, signing a contract in which it took all the risk of cost overruns. Even changes demanded by customers fell to Airbus's account, executives say.

But the biggest challenge was in simultaneously developing a new aircraft and building the world's most powerful turboprop engine. Delays and technical problems were inevitable.

By 2009, costs had spiralled so far out of control that Louis Gallois, then Airbus's French chairman, and his German chief executive Tom Enders, threatened to cancel the A400M if its customers did not renegotiate the contract. In the end the partner states agreed a €3.5bn bailout, in return for a share in export revenues, and Airbus took a €4bn provision.

The delivery of the first A400M to the French air force in 2013 was an important milestone but even then new delays have beset the programme. Mr Enders was forced earlier this year to apologise to a gathering of military officials and diplomats for the failures, and Airbus management in Spain, where the A400M is assembled, has been reshuffled.

The crash on Saturday is a tragic reminder of this troubled history and of the scale of Airbus's challenge in getting the aircraft to its customers. But, depending on the outcome of the investigation, it may not jeopardise the future of the aircraft. "It is a young programme and it is not unusual to lose one aircraft or more at this stage," says Douglas Barrie, analyst at IISS, the defence think tank. "We have become so used to getting things right first time."

Additional reporting by Michael Stothard

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