An Airbus A400M aircraft lands in the Seville airport, Spain, on Tuesday, May 12, 2015. Spain has withdrawn flying permission for Airbus A400M planes in production. Photo: AP.
An Airbus A400M aircraft lands in the Seville airport, Spain, on Tuesday, May 12, 2015. Spain has withdrawn flying permission for Airbus A400M planes in production. Photo: AP.
Air forces across Europe suspended flights of the Airbus Group A400M after one of the military transport aircraft crashed near Seville, Spain, killing four people.
Britain's Royal Air Force and Germany's Luftwaffe both said they'd pause operations until more information is available on the cause of the crash, which a German media report suggested may have been engine failure.
The aircraft that went down on Saturday was several minutes into a test flight before being delivered to Turkey.
Germany has just one unit so far, Britain has two, Malaysian one. France, which has six, will only permit "priority flights in operations already under way," Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said at a meeting of European defence ministers.
Among the six people on the plane, all Spanish employees of Airbus, four were killed and two seriously injured, Airbus said. The accident occurred about 1p.m. local time Saturday, 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) north of Seville's San Pablo Airport.
The plane experienced multiple engine failure, according to a report in Germany's Der Spiegel, which cited comments from one of the crash survivors.
The engines are built by a consortium that includes Rolls- Royce Holdings and France's Safran. Neither manufacturer could immediately be reached for comment and Airbus declined to comment on the report.
An Airbus A400M aircraft lands in the Seville airport, Spain, on Tuesday, May 12, 2015. Spain has withdrawn flying permission for Airbus A400M planes in production. Photo: AP.
Airbus said earlier it's investigating the circumstances of the disaster and has dispatched a special team.
The incident is the first crash of an A400M.
Television news coverage showed the aircraft, which carried the manufacturing serial number 23, completely destroyed and a large plume of black smoke rising over the scene.
Photos supplied by the local government indicate the plane went down in a field, with wreckage strewn across a wide area and fire services on site to extinguish the blaze.
The crash scene near Seville airport, Spain. Photo: AP.
"It's a human tragedy, but an accident like this does not indicate a design flaw that would jeopardize the program" said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of Teal Group, an aviation advisory firm based in Fairfax, Virginia.
Germany's only A400M so far was delivered in December and is still undergoing tests.
The country has ordered 53 in total, a spokesman for the Defence Ministry said.
Britain has two of the aircraft, according to a Ministry of Defence spokeswoman.
France already has six A400Ms that Airbus started delivering since September 2013 and expects to get three more this year.
The accident will have no affect on the planemaker's test program, which is scheduled to conduct its next flight on Tuesday, an Airbus spokesman said.
The A400M has been undergoing intensive testing as Airbus develops the aircraft's military capabilities
The company has three aircraft in the program now. Production of the planes for customers will also continue as normal, he said.
The two flight recorders from the plane were recovered on Sunday and handed to the judge investigating the crash, the Spanish Ministry of Public Works said in a statement.
The so-called black boxes are central parts of an air accident investigation, as they help reconstruct the final moments in a cockpit as well as the aircraft's performance.
Large planes are typically equipped with two recorders: one that tapes conversations and noises in the cockpit, and another that stores hundreds of parameters on the aircraft's performance.
The four-engine A400M turboprop transporter is assembled in Seville, in southern Spain, and the aircraft has started service with armed forces in France, Germany, Turkey and Britain.
The aircraft that crashed was to have been Turkey's third such purchase and delivered in June.
An Airbus A400M takes off from Blagnac airport near Toulouse, France in a symbolic show of confidence. Photo: AP.
The A400M is Europe's most costly defence program, aimed at improving the region's military-transport capabilities by replacing models already several decades old.
Airbus has spent years haggling with governments over order numbers and follow-up financing as costs escalated and the A400M had to overcome technical and software issues.
Airbus typically performs two or three test flights on a production plane before it's handed over to the customer. Saturday's flight was the first for MSN023.
The A400M competes with Lockheed Martin Corp.'s smaller Hercules and Boeing's C-17.
Airbus has said the plane handles short, poorly prepared runways better than the C-17 and can carry bulkier cargo than Lockheed's model.
Airbus, which relies chiefly on sales of its civilian airliners, appointed Fernando Alonso, head of flight test operations at the company, to lead the military aircraft unit amid repeated delays and quality shortfalls.
