It’s been rolled out, its new engines have been run, yet neither the Airbus A400M nor its EuroProp International TP400-D6 powerplants have yet taken to the air. Successful flight testing cannot come soon enough — especially when a US military requirement is waiting to be met.

Report: Robert Hewson

Photo: Airbus

For most of this year, the game of ‘when do you think the A400M will fly?’ has been one of the most popular sports in aviation. Airbus and EADS executives have been bombarded with this evergreen question and so far pretty much all of their answers have been wrong.
For aircraft programs, the maiden flight is usually a totemic event. While important, getting into the air should not be the hard part. Delivering an operational system that meets its performance promises is usually much more tricky. With that in the mind, the Airbus A400M’s problems are two-fold. Before it can embark on flight testing it needs (four) functioning engines. Right now the A400M is in the unenviable position of having brand new engines that are almost ready, but not quite. Once the aircraft makes it into the air it has to perform as advertised — and quickly. It is an unwelcome double hurdle for the project to clear.

Gap in the airlift market

Strategic air transport is an expensive business. The 10 new C-17s funded for the US Air Force earlier this year will cost $3.6 billion (money the USAF was unable to provide from its own budget). Britain leased four C-17s and then bought another two, but the total cost of that procurement was more than £1.2 billion ($2.4 billion) over the life of the program. Having spent £769 billion on a seven-year lease, the UK handed over a further £220 million earlier this year to purchase the aircraft outright. The C-17s have provided an outstanding capability to the UK’s armed forces, but with an astonishing price tag. Furthermore, the UK Ministry of Defence spent another £100 million in 2007 chartering additional air transport assets, mostly Antonov An-124s, to make up for the airlift shortfall that still exists despite the hard-working C-17 fleet. The handful of other foreign customers who have bought C-17s have done so in very modest numbers, underlining the fact that while everyone needs airlift, few can really afford it.
Airbus’s A400M is supposed to change all that. The military airlift business is largely dominated by Lockheed Martin’s C-130 Hercules in the tactical sector, and by Boeing’s C-17 Globemaster III at the strategic level. However, for most customers the C-17 is too expensive while for many the C-130 is becoming too small. The A400M sits in a ‘sweet spot’ between the two. It lacks the payload/range capability of the C-17 and it’s more expensive than the C-130J — but that’s the wrong way to look at it. The promise of the A400M is that it will deliver near-strategic performance (in touch with the C-17’s) at a much lower cost than the big Boeing. That, at least, is the theory.

Photo: Airbus

Continued delays

It is almost unfair to criticize the A400M for its current delays, given the overall program has a history that stretches back nearly 30 years. What is now the A400M has had many different names, shapes and partners. When the program was finally put under contract in May 2003 it seemed like the era of glacial progress had finally ended. Central to that hope was the fact that the project would be managed by Airbus Military Aircraft, a single organization specially established for the job. Yet by 2007 the A400M was officially late once again. Its own difficulties were compounded by a lack of engineering resources as EADS and Airbus threw everything they had at the much bigger problems of the much more important A380 airliner. As the expected first flight date drew closer, it became clear that the real stumbling block was the A400M’s engine.
The engine has always been the most controversial aspect of the A400M. The original TP400 large turboprop design was rejected in 2002 as too costly, and a new powerplant competition was opened up instead. Facing off were the EuroProp International (EPI) consortium (consisting of ITP, MTU, Rolls-Royce and SNECMA) and the Canadian-based but US-controlled Pratt & Whitney Canada. On offer was a redesigned and uprated TP400-D6 and P&WC’s PW180, based on the core of the PW800 turbofan. In May 2003 EPI was selected to supply its new engine which, at the time, was due to go on test in August 2005 and be delivered in readiness for a first flight in September 2007.
The selection of EPI was criticized by some. It was an unproven, all-new engine which would demand significant resources to develop fully. This was a risky approach. Much worse, in the eyes of a few, it was a protectionist move by the usual European ‘old boys’ club that rejected a better-qualified trans-Atlantic option in favor of artificial support for domestic industry.
However, the selection of the TP400-D6 was a core element of the A400M’s rationale to be an independent, strategic program free from outside limitations on export rights or technology access. It’s also true that as the Western world’s largest ever turboprop engine the TP400-D6 has the potential to become an enormous success and competitive advantage for EPI. A400M sales will support the engine program for many years to come. Now some of EPI’s partners are starting to talk about large turboprops for future commercial airliners, to counter soaring fuel prices, and the technology of the TP400-D6 may have future applications that make the military airlifter market look like very small change.
TP400-D6 engine tests began in October 2005. By then EPI was noting that certification would be in October 2007 with the A400M first flight ‘due shortly after’. In February 2006, with 35 hours on the clock, the engine was run for the first time with its propeller attached.
The A400M’s eight-bladed Ratier-Figeac FH385/386 props are computer-designed works of art, sculpted in composites. French-based Ratier-Figeac (owned since 1998 by the US company Hamilton Sundstrand, formerly Hamilton Standard) beat a counter-proposal from the UK’s Dowty to build the A400M propellers, proving that US-sourced equipment is not always an issue for the program. In April 2003 a major configuration change was announced for the engine/prop arrangement. Out went the conventional clockwise rotation of the four engines and in came a new ‘handed’ model.
The A400M’s engine pairs turn in opposite directions, towards each other, providing airflow down between the engines that is fully symmetric as it sweeps to the rear of the aircraft. Smoothing the slipstream like this allows the vertical and horizontal tail surfaces to be smaller by about 20 per cent. Crucially, this removes weight from the overall design. It also simplifies the flaps and adds a small but important boost to lift at low airspeeds. There haven’t been many handed aircraft in the past and none on the scale of the A400M. The new engine arrangement has been touted as a major A400M design strength but it remains to be seen how the higher speed airflow affects matters such as air drops and parachuting in the real world of operations.
In 2007 the organizers of the 2008 ILA Berlin Air Show were optimistic that the A400M would fly at their event in May/June this year, but it was not to be. In March 2008, the last of the four flight-ready engines were handed over, but the A400M was going nowhere. Airbus and EPI adopted a C-130 testbed for the essential engine flight trials required before the A400M can take off under TP400D-6 power. Selection of the C-130 (the former UK meteorological research aircraft ‘Snoopy’, much-modified and operated by Marshall Aerospace) was controversial within the engine team, within which a much more capable Ilyushin Il-76 test aircraft had initially been preferred.
Integration of the TP400-D6 and the C-130 has proved problematic. The A400M was rolled out at Seville on June 26, 2008, but several predicted first flight dates for the Hercules testbed have come and gone. Fifty test hours are needed before the A400M can follow it into the air. With both the maiden flight of the testbed and the outcome of test program itself still an unknown, Airbus officials hope that the A400M will fly before the end of 2008, but fear it will slide into 2009.
The A400M program is still expected to move into full-rate production in 2010 with deliveries to the first customers (France and Turkey) scheduled for that year also. Germany and the UK should receive their first aircraft in 2011, Spain in 2012 with Belgium and Luxembourg to follow in 2018/2019. ‘Export’ customers South Africa and Malaysia will take the first aircraft in 2011 and 2014 respectively.

New transport requirements

When the case for the A400M was still being made earlier this decade, the arguments in favor tended to highlight its suitability for the humanitarian and disaster relief role. The A400M was to be the ideal platform for earthquake, flood or famine relief, and peacekeeping. It still is, but in recent times the emphasis has returned firmly to military operations. Several of the A400M’s customers are now involved in shooting wars where airlift is vital to sustaining forces deployed over long distances. The reality of ‘expeditionary warfare’ has been accepted not just by the major powers — it is also at the heart of initiatives like the EU Battlegroup, now standing by to deploy with little or no airlift provision.
The world’s armies have shifted towards lightweight, deployable forces, and therein lies a dilemma — once those light forces get into combat they quickly become heavier, as a matter of survival. Faced with an enemy that shoots back, some of the ‘transformational’ approaches to modern warfare start to look very old fashioned indeed. One example is the US Army’s Stryker Brigades, now deployed in Iraq. The urgent addition of extra armor and defensive systems has seen the eight-wheeled Strykers jump in weight. The US Army is preparing a suspension upgrade to cope with a 25 per cent increase in gross weight. The same trend is obvious in the plethora of mine-resistant vehicles appearing today. Armies, if they have a choice, now choose to go to war — even against insurgents — with main battle tanks and other heavy armor, because armor is protection and protection is life.
That trend is set to continue in the next generation of battlefield fighting vehicles such as the US Army’s Future Combat System (FCS) and Britain’s FRES (Future Rapid Effect System). When the 30-ton FCS vehicles becomes a reality, the US Army will no longer be able to fit in a C-130, and there aren’t enough C-17s to go around. Both the US Army and the Marine Corps maintain that they must be able to deliver combat vehicles directly to the battlefield, and with the current tactical transport option (the Hercules) ruled out, the coming of FCS will necessitate an entirely new generation of airlifter for the United States.
Thoughts on these new aircraft are taking shape under the Joint Future Theater Lift (JFTL) study, but it is not an easy process. JFTL has to juggle the Marines’ demand to operate with vertical lift (á la V-22) while the Army needs STOL performance, at the very least. Boeing has proposed its Joint Common Air Lift System (JCALS), which would use a common fuselage and avionics system for both a conventional turbofan-powered transport aircraft and a large tilt-rotor. This is one of the saner concepts that have been drawn up — among the insane ones are giant quad tilt-rotors and monster airships. To build any of these new aircraft will require a substantial investment in some untried technology, when airlift has never attracted the funding and support that it truly deserves.
It is an obvious choice (for some) for the A400M to slot neatly into this requirement. By then the program will surely be up and running smoothly and EADS/Airbus partner Northrop Grumman may even have a major assembly facility operating in the US, thanks to the KC-45A program. As part of the ‘Americanization’ of the A400M, the aircraft may yet find itself re-engined with the PW180 engine, to boost its Dollar value and make it an even more attractive alternative.

The A400M program of record

Germany: 60	France: 50	Spain: 27	UK: 25	Turkey: 10
South Africa: 8	Belgium: 7	Malaysia: 4	Luxembourg: 1

This feature originally appeared in Combat Aircraft issue 9.5 with a minor production error. The full and correct version appears here.