Ditching A400M would hand monopoly to US, says French Senate committee

Abandoning the pan-European Airbus Military A400M airlifter programme would be "tantamount to handing US military transport manufacturers a quasi-monopoly for the next 40 years", a French Senate committee concluded on 10 February.

Josselin de Rohan, chairman of the Senate's foreign affairs, defence and armed forces committee, added that such a move would also "greatly damage the credibility of Europe's efforts to build a strong defence identity".

The comments came as the committee considered a 93-page Senate report on the technical woes of the EUR20 billion (USD26 billion) A400M project that has seen deliveries of the first aircraft set back from 2009 to a possible 2012-13 timeframe. The committee said that the programme could face further delays and is likely to entail substantial cost overruns.

The report came amid rising speculation in European military and industry circles that the seven governments that ordered a total of 180 A400Ms in 2003 could look to alternatives because of uncertainty over delivery dates and the final cost.

A member of the panel, Jean-Pierre Masseret, predicted that regular deliveries of the airlifter would not begin until 2014-15 and conceded that A400M would cost more than initially estimated.

He refused, however, to be drawn on the value of cost overruns, claiming it was impossible at the current stage in the programme to estimate a figure. 220 of 638 words