Belgium and six other proper countries have reached an agreement with the European plane maker EADS to share the extra costs of the A400M military transport plane. The A400M is an airplane which is designed to be the most revolutionary militairy airplane.
The agreement was announced by the Spanish Defence Minister Carme Chacon on a meeting of European Union defence ministers in Mallorca.
He is very pleased with this agreement but in my opinion the elation is a bit exaggerated because there is still a lot of work to do. If you think there aren't any agreements about the technical and financial details of this program you can ask questions about this happiness.
Nowadays the project is 5 billion € over its permitted budget due to technical problems. The most important question was who will be responsible or who will be able to remunerate these extra costs?
The difficulties began because there was no strict concensus between theses 7 European countries. There were disagreements between these countries about the time that the order should be ready, other countries prefer to produce more slowly to spread the costs.
For me this is the ultimate evidence that a cooperation between several European countries for such a military project is not easy to realise beacause each country has his own different vision.
Up to now, the seven involved countries (Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Turkey, UK) have ordered together 180 planes, this is equivalent to an extremely high amount of 20 billion €.
In any case the program is delayed and the extra costs are estimated at 5.2 billion €.
It was planned that the airplanes will be ready at the end of this year but due to the delays the planes will not take the skies until 2012.
This blog is based on following article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8534248.stm
Mathias De Bruycker 2FV4
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In my opinion, Belgium and the other 6 countries descided too fast about buying these plains. Descisions were made without any eye of detail or whatsoever. Due to this, there are now problems with the payment of the extra costs that have been made, and the project is delayed.
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