Picture: Andrew Linnett, Crown copyright UK and France has jointly awarded the common in-service support contract to Airbus Defence and S...
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| Picture: Andrew Linnett, Crown copyright |
The contract was awarded by the UK’s procurement agency Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S), and the French Direction générale de l’armement (DGA) through the OCCAR international programme management organisation.
The contract covers all areas of maintenance and includes the implementation of spare parts pooling and the establishment of maintenance engineering services to benefit both air forces.
The UK and France have ordered respectively 22 and 50 A400M Atlas aircraft. To date, Airbus has delivered 7 of the 170 A400M aircraft ordered by the 7 partner nations – Belgium, France, Germany, Luxemburg, Spain, United Kingdom and Turkey.
France has received five aircraft so far, while the UK’s first A400M Atlas was officially unveiled last month at RAF Brize Norton and one has been delivered to Turkey.
The A400M will replace RAF's Lockheed Martin C-130J Hercules which is planned for retirement from 2022.
The A400M was launched in 2003 to respond to the combined needs of seven European Nations. Its maiden flight took place on 11th December 2009.
It has a maximum payload of up to 37 tonnes (81 600 lb), allowing to airlift an heavy mobile crane, four personnels and three military pallets, to 1780 nm (3300 km). The A400M can also carry 116 personnel, or paratroops.
Airbus claims that its new maintenance concept inspired from commercial civil airliners, will translate into a very high dispatch reliability of 98.7 per cent at entry into service.
