Berlin 20-01-2010
For any pilot who will have to fly them, falling asleep in the cockpit of the new EADS/Airbus A400M military transporter is never a good idea – but that is exactly what the managment of the company building the new airplane , EADS/Airbus, seems to have done.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers audit – which was commissioned by the buyers of the EADS/Airbus A400M military aircraft – has found vast cost over-runs.
The report also implies that the company could and should pay for them itself. EADS/Airbus which as a company reportedly has a cash surplus of 8 billion Euro, has not yet commented on the PWC report.
This comes a day before talks, the last of a series, in Berlin, which address the immediate future of one the Europe’s largest arms project ever, which presently hangs under a 11 billion Euro cost-over-run cloud. It will be an interesting excercise to investigate how a large company, at the apex of technology like EADS/Airbus, can lose track of 11 billion Euro. [!]
The audit claims that rising costs for the project were out of control and increased progressively apparently unbeknown to the management of EADS/Airbus.
With 60 of the total 180 planes thus far having been ordered, the German Defense ministry is the largest single A400M customer,
Tags: , Berlin A400m meeting
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