Mil-Log
Singapore 2010: A civic duty for A400M?
In what could be a last attempt to capture further customers for the A400M in Asia, Airbus Military has decided to see whether there could be a potential market in non-military missions.
At the company product briefing - where all questions of costs, programme difficulties and contracts were put off limits by Airbus' PR machine - Peter Scoffham, Vice President Defence Capability Marketing focused on what he termed 'civic missions'. The question being whether governments in the region could be tempted to buy the aircraft not for its military utility, but for a basket of other operations.
It appears that the region's large number of recent humanitarian disasters could be a good business opportunity for Airbus Military as it fights to control the costs of the platform and make any profit from developing the A400M. Scoffham presented several view slides that showed how the A400M could be used to carry vital equipment to the scene of disasters such as the Sumatra earthquake in September last year.
There is no doubt that the A400M would give greater capability to get large pieces of engineering equipment, as well as humanitarian supplies, in to disaster sites quickly. The more difficult question to answer was whether the potential public relations problems of repeatedly referencing disasters in the region was worth the gamble for a few extra orders.
The obvious suitability of A400M in this role, however, did not hold for some of the other potential civic missions on Scoffham's list. Another operational scenario was the use of the aircraft as a coastal surveillance platform with Scoffham showing how the A400M could cover the coastline between Djibouti and Mogadishu in a single sortie helping to prevent piracy in the region although there was no detail on what sensors A400M would carry for this role
The other major scenario involved the use of the A400M as a search and rescue asset.
Scoffham illustrated how the aircraft could be used to conduct a search mission in the waters off India. With a mission radius of 500 nautical miles the aircraft would be able to conduct a search pattern covering 2850nm and be able to stay on station for over 12 hours while carrying a 1000kg payload.
By Darren Lake, Singapore
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