Further purchases of A400's binned due to cost.
 

Though I do know where there are some C130J's going cheap....
These additional A400's were remember to pick up the slack when the C130 was retired... Sigh, every man and his dog are strengthening their military during uncertain times and the UK PLC are chopping it left, right and centre, while they blow £100bn on a sodding rail link with 't Norf that will knock a whole 15 minutes off the journey time..:ugh:

WTF does "Air Command is developing an affordable choice to improve A400M availability"




https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/plans-to-buy-more-transport-aircraft-scrapped-due-to-cost/

..

Forgot to mention

perhaps it means: "buy the spares that we were too cheap to buy in the first place"?

Greeks are smart to snap these up. Long live the Herc.

I weep ... I just weep. Where has my old RAF gone?

Has anyone at Air noticed there's a bloody war going on at the border of NATO?

"The only thing to replace an old Hercules"....yes, I know; I've said it before..on several threads

Madness to get rid of Albert. We should have binned off A400 and bought more Alberts and C17s.

Not many jobs in the UK buying those

Maybe, but there aren't many jobs not buying A400 either

there's always been the pull of local jobs and investment over value for money . TBH the UK taxpayer would probably have saved a large fortune if we just asked the USAF to add on 5% of their buy of any type for the UK

The UK has a spectacular track record of asking questions that can only be answered with 'political gerrymandering'. 'What sits between a C130J and C-17?' Easy, nothing that makes any operational or operating sense - but Blair wanted to burnish his EU credentials so we got lumped with the A400M as a very expensive (and seemingly unreliable?) 'Super Medium' or 'Light Heavy' airlifter. At least the evidence on C17 capability was so overwhelming that we simply had to keep it - likely through the gritted teeth of europhiles. Another good one is 'What sits between a Puma/Sea King and a Chinook?'. Again, nobody else bothers with this stupid question; you either don't buy Chinook and have a mixed fleet of mediums/super mediums or you buy Chinook and a 'proper' medium. The UK? Nah - let's have 20-odd of those Merlins. More expensive to buy/fly than a Chinook, between 30-50% of the capability (depending what you're moving and where…) and barely any tangible benefit over an uprated Puma 2 - in a far bigger and costlier airframe. But, the Garage Door manufacturers in Somerset needed to be kept in business nailing together aircraft so 'have that RAF!' and ignore all that OA/Staff work and inter-service agreement that the answer was 'more Chinooks'. An extra 20-30 Chinooks would have been pretty handy in Afghanistan….For UK PLC, post C130J retirement, we will have nothing between a CH-47 and A400M with the exception of a few shiny Falcon biz jets. That's a huge capability hole, and one entirely of our own political making. Surely, if this truly is our '1938 moment', and if we're asking questions about a 'war reserve' of T1 Typhoons, at least looking at extending Albert back to 2035 is a sensible hedge? Somebody tell me that the handful of Desk Officers in AIR not looking for the latest woke bandwagon to leap on to appease the Star Chamber are pulling together an Option as we speak to extend the C130?

Not wishing to derail the thread :E with the subject of HS2, but Nutty, you need to do some reading up on HS2, as knocking 15 minutes off a journey time is NOT why HS2 is being built. HS2 is being built for the added capacity, by removing the fast through express trains from the WCML onto HS2 which will free up capacity on that route for added local train services and more importantly extra freight use.

However, chopping Albert and reducing Atlas buy seems barking mad.......(while having the highest houred C-17 fleet!)

;)


https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....13ea72e64c.jpg

GeRam while that is a laudable aim, hacking bits off the planned new network ( Leeds) to reduce costs does throw that advantage into question, and as far as 't norf, once past Crewe you are back to the old infrastructure and Manchester is more midlands than the North.... (Speaking as a Northern lad)

Blame the Army!

In 2002 the FRES User Requirement Document required a battlegroup to deploy at least x000nm with crew and mission essential equipment, and to be able to undertake operations within one hour of deplaning.

It was determined by a Studies Assumptions Group that the current UK air fleet could not deploy a C130 compliant FRES battlegroup within the CI4a timelines. That, the C130 envelope placed too stringent a constraint on FRES, so the most efficient means of strategic air transport of a FRES-equipped force and its combat supplies was considered to be by A400M and ‘other Future Large Aircraft’.

Therefore, DEC DBE (Direct Battlefield Engagement) selected A400M compliance as a system-level Key User Requirement for FRES, with C130 as (merely) a priority 1 requirement, Mobility and C2 roles being the priority for C130J compatibility. Priority 1 often falls into the you must be bloody joking category when it comes to approvals.

The pitfalls are obvious. The FRES URD was a beyond parody, and clearly wouldn’t be delivered within a decade of the notional In Service Date. And so it proved. (And it wasn’t DEC DBE’s top priority at the time anyway). The knock-on effects on other programmes, not least C130, were equally obvious. And managing such programmatic integration is quite difficult, and almost impossible if not resourced correctly. (Just because FRES slips, doesn’t mean dependencies get compensatory funding, which creates gaps). One of the assumptions made was that this would all be managed by a Service HQ department that had been shut down 15 years before, without replacement. The technical term is **** show.

Thats what happens when you allow one group to spec something - they go for the Rolls Royce option - there should be effective management to look at alternatives but hey this is the MoD

On the other A400 thread, it says the Spanish have some surplus.

Regardless of the A400 v C130 debate an aircraft can only be in one place at once & apart from Belgium & Luxembourg every other A400 operator has a fleet of smaller aircraft (C130, C235 & C295) to supplement the A400 fleet, is everyone else wrong & the RAF is right?
The RAF will be left with 2 x Falcon 900, 22 x A400, 8 x C17 & 10 x A330 while the UK has more military commitments than most & is heavily involved in humanitarian aid which will keep them very busy.

Where did we leave those Andovers?

They became Seconandovers..

FIFY. Don't forget BBMF's "other" C-130 replacement.

Do please remind us what UK jobs are in the A400. Assembly is in Spain, engines built in Munich, the props come from France ... I think the wings do come from Chester, but the capacity there is sold out anyway on other Airbus programmes, so nothing additional.