With the ongoing delays to the Airbus A400M military transport, we have one last chance to decide if it is big enough for Europe's strategic deployment needs.
Heavy equipment will be transported by sea, but any advance party will be vulnerable unless it can fly in some medium armour with it. For this, the A400M would have to have a payload of 45t instead of its current quoted 37t.
If Europe cannot obtain use of a friendly port and transit road, then all equipment would have to be flown in, as happened with some parts of the former Yugoslavia. Anybody watching the US build-up in the Gulf would realise that the current A400M would be hard pushed to perform a similar job for Europe. Let's scale-up the design while it's still in the computer.
The quickest, simplest solution is to go even larger and licence-build the Boeing C-17 in Europe, much as the Lockheed Martin F-16 was two decades before.
John Hartley Woking, Surrey, UK
Source: Flight International
