Computer illustration of proposed A400M military plane
Posted on 03/09/2010 1:12:45 AM PST by bruinbirdman
EADS, the owner of planemaker Airbus, has scrapped its dividend as overruns on the troubled A400 military plane drove it to a loss last year.
EADS, which is the world's second-biggest aerospace company after Boeing, today reported a net loss of 763m euros (£693m) for last year compared with a profit of 1.57bn euros in 2008. Revenues fell to 42.8bn euros from 43.3bn euros.
The company told investors last week that delays on the A400M military transport aircraft it's building for European governments would force it to take a charge of 1.8bn euros. The charges also left EADS, based in both Paris and Munich, nursing an operating loss of 322m euros compared with an operating profit of 2.83bn euros.
Overruns on the A380 superjumbo, which Airbus doesn't expect to be profitable for several years, also contributed to last year's losses. "The A380 continued to weigh heavily on the underlying performance," EADS said today.
Computer illustration of proposed A400M military plane
The A400M is designed to replace ageing military planes and is already a third more costly than originally budgeted for. Tom Enders, the chief executive of Airbus, had complained in January that the company's spending of 150m euros a month on the planes was not sustainable.
Today's loss comes less than 24 hours after EADS and its American partner, Northrop-Grumman, dropped out of a nine-year, two-horse $40bn (£27bn) race to provide the US Air Force with a fleet of air tankers after accusing the American government of skewing the competition in rival Boeing's favour
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
World trade should be you buy our Chevy’s and we’ll buy your Telefunken ... not go into partnership and combine the two.
For some reason reminds me of a Flying Coffin!
How much would a realistically priced A400M cost compared to a C-17?
No comparison. The A400M is a bit bigger than a C-130J, but smaller than the C-17 by a significant margin.
UK finally sold out of EADS?
yitbos
I really was wondering why they would put so much money into a plane that competed with the C-130.
I know the thing is still in production and it’s as mature an aviation platform that exists.
The C-130J looks the same as the older variants, but it’s really almost an all new aircraft that just happens to look the same. They have all new engines, props, avionics and wings, for starters.
Forgot to mention: the new J-model has 40% greater range, 21% higher maximum speed, and 41% shorter take-off distance than the earlier E/H models.
And they even figured out how to make a tanker version that can provide ground support with a 30mm cannon, Hellfires, and laser/GPS guided munitions. Talk about loiter time.
The funny part is that Lockheed was involved early on with the A400M project, got fed up with the ‘design-by-committee-but-please-make-it-a-jobs-program-too’ so they bailed out, went home, and thoroughly modernized the C-130 instead. The C-130J-30 comes within a hair of all the capabilities of the larger A400M, and is going to be cheaper.
I’m sure the C-130J is completely different from the originals built in the 50’s except cosmetically.
My point is why would you want to get into competing with the most universal military cargo carrier ever made? You’re trying to compete against nearly 60 years of design/material/structural/engineering improvements. The aircraft has depots of spare parts all over the world to boot.
Seems to me this effort did nothing but burn up billions of Euros that will never be recoupled.
EADS is nothing but a jobs program. Does that help?
Like nuclear submarines. The limiting factor would be the food supply. Or maybe TBMO...
Couldn’t the Euros kick in another subsidy for their supranational champion.
And it’s tail is still similar to the old Hughes Hercules.
The Brits and Nato have already bought standard C-17’s. so have the Ausies and Canada.
Of course with an order that big, it would make sense for Boeing to also develop a stretched, higher gross weight, longer ranged version that could be used to replace the C-5A's.
bump
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