WASHINGTON, March 20 (UPI) -- The continuing and escalating problems with A400M, Europe's showcase military air transport, go far deeper than they appear. And what is already apparent is bad enough.
The A400M, which is being developed by the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., is already years behind schedule. The prototype aircraft is vastly overweight and the engines being developed for it are seriously underpowered. All this means that even when the aircraft are delivered, their performance capabilities will be far below the specifications promised to the various European air forces that already have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in buying them.
As things currently stand, the A400M is not scheduled to start its test flights until early 2010, with the first aircraft for operational use being delivered in late 2012. But large-scale deliveries of the aircraft to European air forces that are waiting for it therefore will not begin before 2014 at the earliest.
The European civilian airliner industry, while heavily subsidized, is also highly experienced and successful. The EADS subsidiary Airbus is second only to the United States' Boeing in its success in selling its aircraft around the world. And the technology involved in adapting a civilian airliner design into a heavy military air transport should not be insurmountable. U.S. aircraft companies have been doing that for nearly 70 years, since the famous DC-3 airliner with its two piston engines was easily adapted to become the Allies' main workhorse air transport through World War II.
It is certainly the case that aircraft, both civilian and military, are far more expensive and complex to design and adapt today than they were 70 years ago. It is also true that it is generally much easier to adapt military designs for civilian use rather than the other way around.
A major reason for this is that military requirements are always far more demanding than civilian ones. It is no coincidence that Boeing's breakthrough 707, the first truly reliable and successful civilian airliner in history, took to the skies more than a decade after Boeing had produced exceptionally successful similar military designs with its B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Superfortress strategic bombers for the U.S. Air Force.
By contrast, the 707's only serious rival, the British De Havilland Comet 1, crashed three times after it came into commercial use -- in two of the crashes killing everyone on board. Unlike Boeing, with its long-established experience in building jet bombers, the British had never before mastered the problems of safely maintaining fully pressurized aircraft interiors at high altitudes.
The A400M concept suffers from other woes as well. EADS' aircraft plants are scattered across the 27-nation European Union. Different factories operate using their own national languages. While it's common for major high-tech work in the United States to be spread around the country to secure the support of senators and congressmen from the beneficiary states, at least the workers are all in the same country, speak the same language, and are used to operating in an integrated technical culture. None of those factors apply in Europe, despite decades of trying to make it so.
EADS also enjoys vastly more political protection from the European Commission in Brussels and from the main EU nations that support it. But this in turn has freed it from many market pressures that still apply to the biggest U.S aircraft manufacturers, so EADS business practices and bureaucracy move far more slowly and are more expensive and inefficient than those of their main U.S. competitors.
Finally, as we have noted before, EADS managers and engineers simply didn't realize the scale of the challenge they were taking on. It takes decades for even a mature, advanced industrial economy to develop the expertise to create its own first-class weapons systems. The United States was already by far the dominant industrial power on the planet in World War I, but its aircraft industry was woeful. Even in World War II, the U.S. armaments industry produced the finest combat aircraft and warships in the world, but it was never able to produce any main battle tanks that could compare with the best German and Soviet designs.
The Western European aircraft companies one day may be able to produce combat aircraft, bombers and air transports that are at least as good as their American counterparts. But they are still a long way from getting there.
