Airbus Military is busy completing the first production A400M airlifter, which will be delivered to the French Air Force around the end of the year.
The aircraft is being assembled in Seville, Spain, where the A400M final assembly line is located. The final assembly process for the aircraft, known as MSN7, started last November. The nose and fuselage are already integrated and the aircraft was recently moved, on its landing gear, to the workstation in which the structural assembly is carried out, Airbus Military reports.
Integration works for the wing started last week and both the horizontal and the vertical tailplanes, which have already been mated, have just been moved to the final assembly station, known as Station 40, with the rest of the aircraft. The A400M will then be powered up for the first time before the aircraft is moved to the Ground System Tests area.
France has 50 A400M heavy transport on order. The A400M is four years late, largely due to development problems with its engines, the largest turboprops built in the West, and the flight management system from Thales. Last year Europrop International, which makes the A400M’s TP400-D6 engines, said the engine problems have been addressed and fixes are in place. An engine glitch caused the A400M to be pulled from the flight display lineup at last year’s Paris Air Show.
The A400M has been developed at a cost of more than 20 billion euros for Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Turkey. The aircraft has been flying since December 2009. Safety certification is scheduled for the second quarter of this year.
By late December last year the A400M had accumulated more than 2,500 of the 3,700 hours required to complete a core programme of flight testing before the start of production deliveries.
The fifth and final A400M development aircraft joined the flight test fleet at the end of last year, which will assist in the completion of flight testing before deliveries begin.
Despite the aircraft’s complexity and development problems, Airbus parent EADS says the A400M will be a reliable and effective aircraft once it enters service. Airbus hopes to sell around 500 more of the planes, from which it will pay back part of the extra money pumped in by purchasing nations.
Some 174 aircraft remain on order with seven NATO nations and one export customer – Malaysia, which ordered four. Turkey, with 10 aircraft on order, will be the second user to receive an aircraft, delivery being expected in the second half of 2013 by when the aircraft should meet Standard Operational Capability 1 (SOC1).
Britain and Germany will receive aircraft in 2014 (they have 22 and 53 A400M on order respectively), while Malaysia will receive its first heavy-lifter at the end of 2014 or in early 2015. Spain’s first delivery of 27 aircraft bought falls over the year-end 2015/16, when SOC2 should be available, with SOC2.5 following in late 2017 and SOC3 at the end of 2018. This will also be when deliveries to Belgium and Luxembourg should start – the former has seven and the latter one aircraft on order.
SOC3 will include the software required to allow the A400M to conduct low level terrain avoidance flight.
Due to delays and cost increases, some nations have cut back their A400M orders or cancelled them outright, as South Africa did in November 2009 after citing massive cost inflation. At the end of November last year Airbus signed an agreement with Armscor that confirmed the cancellation of the eight aircraft ordered in 2005. As a result, Airbus Military refunded South Africa €321 million (R3.48 billion) in pre-payments and other related costs.
“The agreement we signed with Armscor…lets us all move forward together to explore further opportunities, including upcoming acquisition projects led by Armscor,” said Airbus Military CE, Domingo Urena.
The A400M was designed to give Europe autonomy in military transport, which is dominated by the Lockheed Martin C130 Hercules turboprop and the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III jet transport. But technical problems and mismanagement kicked the project four years behind schedule and €7.6 billion over budget. For a while, the A400M crisis cast a shadow over the future of EADS as the cost of abandoning the project would have been staggering in penalties alone. More recently, EADS has been embarrassed by an improvement in its finances, which left it with a sharply higher cash surplus than it had when it approached buyer nations for help.
