Update. 19/06/2015
4 years passes and still no further with the A400M other than expense and delay. Are historians smoking something too academic? Are they sure that the industrial revolution actually started in UKplc? Evidence suggests otherwise. I mean surely after 200 years of doing something one might be quite good at it by now!! Go ask Dom Perignon or silk worms.
As time progresses this little Brasilian number looks more and more attractive in the hyper littoral. Useful and cheap enough to be treated like an Avro Lancaster was, like a round of ammunition.
Image source.
Twenty-two months after comparing a few big lifters let us have a swaatch at the big birds again.
AN70. No need to update, it staggers along as always.
As usual with any make work RICO infested project the A400M is in the shit, there is no money and yet they are still going to procure a load.
The XC2 development work is accelerating but again there is no money and yet they are still going to procure a load.
AN70 flys on with a bit more light at the end of the tunnel, still no money though.
Having watched this sorry tale for more than 20years a few tentative conclusions can be reached.
Number 1. The RUFAF(Air branch of Jean Companie Ag), Royaume Uni French Air Force, will never take charge of the numbers that conned so much money to be transferred from tax payers to make work gang masters. With final assembly in Spain you can be assured that a large slice of every hull’s price tag will be laundered into ChiComm bank accounts in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
Number 2. These A400Ms are not going far. Do you remember the crap spewed about returning from east of Suez in the 1960s? I never forget, so whilst the bulk of UKplc fire power has been parked way east of Suez for a quarter of a century now, it is all being disbanded or brought back home finally, half a century late. However the smart lads have been ordered to provide RCE/TA with covering fire as it disengages from any pretence of it being a Western “Nation”. To that end you can expect these John Company RUFAF A400Ms spending a lot of time setting desert areas around the Med on fire. Algeria anyone? Or pissing around the Russian periphery. White Sea, Ossetia anyone?
Number 3. Looking at the current US airlift fleet, C17 and C5M, the C2 cruises at their rate so good for route planning and scheduling. It has the look of being far more integrated with US operations out in the littoral than they make us aware of. It is also being modest with its lifting capability I reckon. Rough back of the envelope calculations not needed. Just ratios C17/160,000lbs thrust/170,000lbs payload, C5M/200,000lbs thrust/280,000lbs payload, C2/120,000lbs thrust/84,000lbs payload.
Someone is hiding their lifting light under a heavy bushel.
Anyway here’s a little something from the last days east of Suez. In Belfast!
