Delivery of A400M military airbus delays further
23/9/2008 17:58
The first deliveries of Airbus A400M military transport plane are expected
to start at least one year later than initially planned, a senior official in
charge of European arms procurement affairs said yesterday.
Patirck
Bellouard, EA Director of the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation
(OCCAR), told the French press that as the first engine test had been postponed
until October, the maiden test flight of the military transport aircraft,
previously scheduled for July 2008, was expected to conduct by the end of this
year.
The first deliveries of A400M have to be delayed to the end of 2010,
Bellouard said. According to the contract, the first A400M was scheduled to
deliver to the French air force in October 2009.
Bellouard said that the
European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), the parent company of
Airbus, was destined to be fined for the delay. However, He denied the reports
from German media that EADS has threaten to abandon A400M program if got
penalty.
EADS has never conducted this kind of "blackmail", Bellouard
said.
The A400M project is the biggest ever European defense program to build
a transport aircraft to develop a replacement for the US Hercules C-130 and the
Franco-German Transall C-160.
EADS announced last October that the company
decided to postpone A400M's first test flight to the summer of 2008 due to
slower-than-expected development of the TP400 turboprop engines.
The partner
nations of A400M program, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain, Turkey,
Belgium and Luxembourg, signed an agreement in May 2003 to buy about 200 A400M
planes, worth of 20 billion euros (US$29.4 billion). These nations decided to
charge OCCAR with the management of the acquisition of the A400M.
Xinhua
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