Customer nations, manufacturer hold new round of talks on troubled Airbus military plane

Wrangling over troubled Airbus plane intensifies

BERLIN — European aerospace company EADS and officials from the seven countries that ordered its Airbus A400M military transporter wrangled anew Thursday over the financing and future of the troubled program.

High-ranking defense officials, EADS’ CEO Louis Gallois and representatives of the plane-making subsidiary Airbus met in Berlin, a German Defense Ministry spokesman said on condition of anonymity in line with department policy.

The talks, the fourth round in recent weeks, had been scheduled to last until midday but were still ongoing in the early afternoon.

They coincided with a regular summit in Paris between the leaders of France and Germany, two key customers.

“We will find a solution,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters. “It’s a decisive project and we’ll find a solution quickly.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that “the negotiations should be continued” on the A400M.

EADS has urged the seven nations — Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Turkey — to increase their funding for the delayed project by euro6.4 billion (nearly $9 billion).

It threatened to scrap the program if no agreement is reached and originally gave the governments until the end of January to make a decision — a deadline that was missed.

France’s defense minister, Herve Morin, said on Monday that he hopes the parties can agree to share the financial burden and save the project by the end of the week.

Morin has said the seven countries’ defense ministers also will discuss the issue on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, that starts Thursday.

The German Defense Ministry has said it is committed to finding a solution suitable for all parties.

Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was quoted in a parliamentary newsletter last week as saying that the seven nations were willing to contribute a maximum of euro2 billion ($2.81 billion) in extra funding.

However, the Financial Times Deutschland daily reported Thursday that governments were prepared to increase their funding beyond that in an effort to find a solution. It cited unidentified industry sources.

Spanish daily El Pais reported that the Defense Ministry in Madrid is proposing buyer nations pay euro2.6 billion in cost overruns.

A final agreement on the matter at the meeting in Berlin seemed unlikely as it would have to be agreed by the national governments, a person familiar with the talks said on condition of anonymity, citing the confidentiality of the matter.

The four-engine turboprop military plane — now four years behind schedule — had its maiden flight in December. The price tag for the 180 planes ordered was fixed at almost euro20 billion in the initial contract in 2003.

The A400M is seen as occupying an important niche market between the Lockheed Martin C-130J Hercules, which carries only half the payload, and Boeing’s C-17 Globemaster III, which is larger, costlier, and less tactically versatile.

Associated Press Writer Deborah Seward in Paris contributed to this report.