| The French president did not allow American engines to power a new European plane This week, the largest aerospace concern in Europe and the second most important in the world, EADS, officially announced the start of a program to build a new military transport aircraft, the Airbus A400M. The corresponding agreement was signed on Tuesday in Bonn between the concern and the European agency for military equipment OCCAR, which includes seven NATO member countries: Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Luxembourg, Turkey and France. They ordered 180 new military transport aircraft. Even the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg allowed itself to fork out for one A400M.
This $20 billion order is the largest in EADS history. The co-chairmen of the board of the concern, Philippe Camus and Rainer Hartrich, inspired by the first step towards the real take-off of the new transport aircraft, said that the A400M has good prerequisites to “replace a significant part of the world fleet of tactical transport aircraft” in the coming years. However, nothing was said about the actual dimensions of this supposed “part”.
The main consumer of new military transport aircraft will be the German Luftwaffe, for which, after many years of painful discussions (during one of them, the issue of trust in Federal Chancellor Schröder was even discussed in parliament), 60 A400M vehicles were ordered with a total cost of 8.3 billion euros.
In addition to the countries that are members of the OCCAR agency, according to the EADS concern, “other major armed forces” with which negotiations are already underway will show interest in purchasing the aircraft. However, even in the EU countries, the project of a new transport aircraft was progressing with difficulty until the last moment. Only a few days ago, the Bundestag blessed the financing of German participation in this expensive project. However, Italy and Portugal completely abandoned the project due to its high cost.
For the Germans, participation in the production of new military transport aircraft is justified not only by the lack of modern air transport in the Bundeswehr for transporting heavy equipment over long distances. Engine assembly for the A400M will be carried out in Germany, which will provide hundreds of jobs for many years to come. This decision was won in a fight against American competitors, who were eager to participate in the project with all their might. French President Jacques Chirac personally led European aircraft manufacturers to the barricades against the American company Pratt & Whitney and the head of the French branch of Airbus, Noel Forgeard, who preferred engines from the United States. At the beginning of May, he managed to finally convince aircraft manufacturers that the only acceptable engine for the A400M was a European-made engine.
In early May, European engine manufacturers were given a special week to think carefully about the proposed conditions. After some hesitations of a financial nature, Chirac's struggle was supported by the Schröder government in the fight for the European engine - as it was said, for “strategic and production-political reasons.” The American company offered a more profitable financial solution. However, additional jobs in the European aircraft industry were even more impossible to neglect. Yuri Shpakov, Berlin |
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