LOCKHEED MARTIN has a potential customer, which knows it needs a new military air lifter, but wants a partner or partners to help with its development. Europe has a potential builder for a new military air lifter, but no specification, role or mission on which its uncommitted potential customers can agree. Is somebody missing something here?

Lockheed Martin has been the US military's chosen manufacturer of tactical and strategic air lifters for most of the last four decades, with its C-130 Hercules, C-141 Starlifter and C-5 Galaxy. Only McDonnell Douglas (MDC) has broken the sequence, with its C-17 Globemaster 3.

Lockheed Martin's great rival, Boeing, has similarly dominated the US military's tanker/transport fleet for the same time, with its C/KC-135. Again the only other manufacturer, to have picked up any of this market, has been MDC with its KC-10.

With the exception of the newly popular C-17, all these aircraft are aging. Lockheed Martin has, in the C-130J, produced a successor to the original Hercules. All the indications are that this new aircraft will inherit the US and international-market dominance of its predecessor, just as the C-17 will assume much of the role of the C-5.

There is no such simple succession yet in place for the USA's 600-odd C/KC-135s and 250 C-141s, however, and it is that huge potential market which Lockheed Martin (and, doubtless, Boeing and MDC) would like to address.

Apart from the desire to build a new military air lifter, the situation could scarcely be more different in Europe. Western Europe's air forces between them operate about 140 Hercules and some 160 smaller Transall C-160 tactical air-lifters. Their strategic transport capabilities, are minimal in US terms, consisting as they do of less than 50 converted airliners (mostly dual-purpose tanker/transports), none of them bigger than the Royal Air Force's Lockheed TriStars and the Netherlands' MDC DC-10s.

The RAF has worn out many of its Hercules, and is replacing the first 25 of them with C-130Js. France may do the same with some of its Hercules. Beyond that, however, there are few prospects for any new aircraft - except for the so-far-nebulous Future Large Aircraft, or FLA. This multi-national project, which is nominally under the wing of the purpose-built Airbus Military Aircraft Company, is a typical international project, which is going nowhere fast.

The problem - as ever with a multi-national European problem - is complex. There is no agreement on the target mission for the FLA or on the role or roles it might fulfil. There is no agreement on how it should be powered. There is no agreement on when it should enter production or service. There is no agreement on its size, its payload or its performance.

Several of the partner nations (including the UK) have made more-or-less woolly commitments to buying an FLA should it appear, but the project's hitherto-most-ardent supporter (France) has withdrawn its financial support, at least in the short term. In short, the only thing on which the partner nations can agree is (since the French stopped calling it the Avion de Transport Futur, or ATF) the name.

Despite the lack of agreement, there is no doubt that the Europeans will need to replace both their tactical air lifters and their longer-range tanker-transports in the medium term. There is little doubt that, no matter what configuration or specification it may have, the FLA will never be a cost-effective one-on-one replacement for the Hercules.

There is equally little doubt that, at the moment, an ideal replacement for Europe's long-range airliner-based tanker/transports does not exist. There is little, if any, doubt that most European forces would like to have a strategic airlift capability of their own, rather than relying on the USA for moving large pieces of equipment fast over long distances.

So why have Europe's manufacturers not given up the struggle to define the undefinable FLA, and directed their efforts towards developing a product which, with Lockheed Martin's or MDC's or Boeing's involvement, might satisfy a genuine forthcoming requirement from a customer who wants aircraft instead of artificially maintained jobs? Who knows: some Europeans might find that a Starlifter/KC-135 replacement is just what they wanted, anyway.

Source: Flight International