Julian Moxon/PARIS
The first Paris air show since he took power in June 1997 gave French prime minister Lionel Jospin a prime opportunity for self-congratulation.
Within only a few months of assuming office, Jospin and his defence minister Alain Richard had put together a plan which solved at a stroke the most urgent problem facing France's state-owned aerospace companies.
The previous right wing leadership of Alain Juppé had tried and failed to create the conditions for the restructuring of the French, and by implication, European aerospace industries. At the end of Juppé's tenure, the attempt had left the future of the two great state-owned companies, Thomson-CSF in the defence electronics sector and Aerospatiale in aeronautics, not only unclear, but had introduced bad blood into the process, making the new prime minister's task even less enviable.
Jospin and Richard's plan called for aborting Juppé's unpopular proposal for pairing Thomson-CSF with the Lagardère group and selling Thomson's consumer electronics division to South Korea. Alcatel was substituted for Lagardère, with Dassault Electronique and the space division of Aerospatiale added.
By the time of the 1998 Farnborough air show, the Aerospatiale-Matra Hautes Technologies alliance had been agreed, with the incorporation of almost half of the capital of Dassault Aviation. Such has been the speed of this merger that the new group achieved its first stock market quotation days before the show.
But while pleased with the success of his own efforts at restructuring the national aerospace industry, Jospin made it clear to aerospace industry chiefs in the traditional prime minister's speech at the end of the Paris air show that he was less than happy about the state of affairs in Europe. "The concentration of activities on the other side of the channel, the hesitations of this or that company and even the breakdown of some co-operative programmes does not give us much confidence," Jospin said.
European action
Jospin wants more action dedicated to establishing a real European armaments industry that, like the USA, can support itself through its own internal market, suggesting that Article 223 of the Treaty of Rome, which places defence outside the rules covering European Community commercial activities, should be modified to include the sector.
"It is imperative that we develop a European civil and military industrial base-everyone must work towards this," Jospin said. He pointed to France's introduction of multi-year procurement in several programmes and the tightening of the weapons acquisition system as evidence of its willingness to create the conditions for a more efficient industry.
The Airbus organisation should be "optimised" to prepare it for transformation into a single company, said Jospin. He confirmed the government's strong support for the A3XX programme and revealed that reimbursable funding for France's share of the project would be included in the 2000 budget.
Jospin has also ordered research minister Claude Allegre to set up a working group to study "the possibility of developing, on a European basis, a supersonic successor to Concorde". Surprisingly, following the failure of ATR's talks with Fairchild Aerospace on a common regional jet programme, he added that he hoped ATR's efforts to develop a regional jet "would soon be crowned with success".
"The European aerospace industry, and notably the French one, is competitive," says Jospin. "Two years ago, I said the reorganisation of our defence and aeronautics industry would be carried out neither with taboo nor exclusivity, while not enclosing it in any pre-established framework and leaving it open for agreements with other European partners'. That's what we have done."
Jospin reminded them that the objective set out in the December 1997 accord between France, UK and Germany "and constantly reaffirmed since then", was the creation of global European alliances that "balance equally their American counterparts in each sector".
He added that while he welcomed the creation of transnational joint ventures on defence and aerospace programmes, they were "imperfect" and should be treated only as an "initial response" to the Government's original demands for transnational mergers.
Source: Flight International
