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Lawmaker: Germany further reduces A400M order
By JUERGEN BAETZ - Jan 25, 2011 8:16 PM GMT+0100 By The Associated Press
BERLIN (AP) — Germany will further cut the number of Airbus A400M military planes bound for its air force by selling some planes on order to other buyers, a senior lawmaker said Tuesday.
Germany will stick with its already reduced order of 53 A400M military transport aircraft,
but now plans to resell 13 of them to cut costs,
said Juergen Koppelin, the governing Free Democrats' deputy caucus leader.
European aerospace company EADS' plane-making subsidiary Airbus is building the A400M — a four-engine turboprop billed as crucial for modernizing Europe's air forces, but it has been plagued by delivery delays and cost overruns.
Germany's Defense Ministry declined to comment on the deal and said the matter would be discussed Wednesday in the parliament's budget committee.
While the industry seems unaffected by the latest reduction in the number of transport planes Germany wants to put in use,
the agreement comes as a new blow to the country's military, which hopes to replace its ageing fleet of 83 Transall C-160 transport planes.
The scaling down also coincides with the armed forces' biggest reform since World War II, ending conscription by this summer and trimming down troop levels from 250,000 to a volunteer force of 185,000.
The reform is meant to save billions of euros while making the military more flexible and giving it a greater capacity to deploy more soldiers in far-flung places for which the A400M is key.
The military transport plane program nearly collapsed over cost overruns, and a struggle between the plane's manufacturer and its military customers over technical and financial problems came to a head last year after EADS threatened to pull the plug on the project.
The euro20 billion ($27 billion) project is about euro5 billion ($6.8 billion) over budget and almost four years behind schedule.
The seven customer nations — Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Turkey —
then agreed to increase the price of the project by euro2 billion,
and also said they would provide an additional euro1.5 billion in exchange for a share of future export sales.
Germany reduced its order from 60 planes to 53, plus options for another seven,
and also renounced some special technology that allows for low-level flights in an effort to keep cost overruns in check —
a deal that the government parties' lawmakers are now set to approve, Koppelin said.
But lawmaker Alexander Bonde of the opposition Greens criticized the agreement as a "gift for EADS" that will be costly to German taxpayers.
Koppelin, however, maintained that reselling 13 planes will eventually reduce the total cost.
"The necessity of renewing the Bundeswehr's fleet of military transport aircraft is undisputed," Koppelin said.
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