Spain and Turkey vow to maintain A400M plane orders

Spain and Turkey vowed on Saturday to maintain their orders for the Airbus A400M, despite mounting delivery delays, and said European nations were working flat-out to save the teetering military programme.Speaking in separate interviews after a NATO summit, defence ministers of both countries took a more cautious stance than Britain and Germany, which have threatened to axe the plane over delays that are disrupting their operations in Afghanistan.Spanish Defence Minister Carme Chacon rejected the possibility, evoked by her German counterpart earlier in the week, that Europe's largest military programme costing taxpayers a total 20 billion euros could collapse altogether."We are prepared for everything in order to be able to save the programme. So that is what we are fighting for," she told Reuters.EADS subsidiary Airbus has said it will be three to four years late in delivering the transport plane and blames a European engine consortium created -- its supporters say -- by politicians to save jobs rather than on industrial merits.

The engine consortium led by Rolls-Royce and France's Safran has denied blame for the delays.EADS faces a repeat of huge penalties that plunged it into a financial crisis following delays to its Airbus A380 superjumbo in 2006 and wants the contract renegotiated to allow more time.Participating nations last month agreed a three-month moratorium while they decide what to do about the EADS bid. But Britain and Germany have also said they might cancel all or part of their share of the project guaranteeing thousands of jobs.Asked whether Spain would follow suit, Chacon said: "We maintain everything we have in the programme."The plane is being assembled in Seville in southern Spain.BI-WEEKLY TALKSThe A400M was ordered in 2003 by France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Turkey, Belgium and Luxembourg to replace transport fleets and support increasingly global military operations.Another 12 were sold to Malaysia and South Africa, but they are not involved in decisions over the project's future.Turkish Defence Minister Vecdi Gonul said ministers from the seven nations had agreed to hold crisis talks every two weeks."We decided at our last meeting that we are going to have a video conference every 15 days to discuss the last stages (of an agreement) and now we are in the evaluation stage," Gonul said.Gonul said the partner nations were discussing the period of any penalty payments with EADS, not just their size."We are discussing the penalty period and how can we solve all the problems," he told Reuters.

Turkey and Spain make up over a quarter of the A400M project, with 25 and 27 orders respectively. In practice Germany, the biggest client, and France and Britain, are said by analysts to have most clout over the giant defence deal.German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said on Tuesday the partners were entitled to cancel the project and that all of them agreed that abandoning it was a "realistic possibility".EADS executives have warned building the plane on the basis of the current contract could cripple the company, which was created in 2000 as the results of a merger of strategic aerospace and defence assets in France, Germany and Spain."We are working very hard on a consensus. We have asked for two months or more to have a new consensus on a redefinition of the programme," Spain's Chacon said.

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