Aircraft

The military division of Airbus has requested a further fine-tuning of the propeller speed on the delayed TP400-D6 turboprop.

The turboprop is being developed to power its A400M transport, with Europrop International (EPI) within weeks of delivering its first engine for flight test.

Graham Hopkins, Rolls-Royce director of defence engineering and technology, says: "We are still discussing with Airbus Military about certain changes they would like to make, but it's certainly not stopping either the flight testbed or the flight test aircraft programme.

"This has nothing to do with extra power requirement," he says of the 11,000shp (8,200kW) design: the most powerful turboprop engine ever developed in the Western world.

Airbus Military has called for the propeller speed to optimise performance at certain cruise points, says RollsRoyce, which forms part of the EPI consortium together with ITP, MTU Aero Engines and Snecma, and supports the TP400-D6 programme from its Filton site near Bristol.

The A400M project earlier this year suffered an at least three-month delay to the start of final assembly activities from late March in Seville, Spain, after an EADS audit identified several programme elements as "critical risks".

However, Airbus Military said there would be no impact on production deliveries, scheduled from October 2009.

Hopkins says a test engine "is ready to go for fit checks" with a modified Lockheed Martin C-130 transport to be flown by Marshall Aerospace, with this delivery having slipped from November 2006.

EPI meanwhile confirms that an April target was missed after "a polluted oil system encountered during the factory test led to a complete recleaning of the engine and a delay of about two months".

The flight-test engine will now be delivered during July, with flight tests to start later this year, it says.

Ground testing of the TP400 has meanwhile now passed 400h, but remains significantly short of the 1,100h originally scheduled for this point in the programme.

However, Axel Arendt, president of R-R Defence Aerospace remains unfazed, terming as "peanuts" the more than six-month engine delay.

"The ability to manage such a gigantic programme in such a short time is comparable to any big commercial customer order," he says.

The TP400, which ran to full power for the first time in February 2006, is scheduled for first flight with an A400M in the first quarter of 2008.

Additional reporting by Craig Hoyle

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