A400M engine: "Propping Up TP400"

This certainly is confidence-building (full text subscriber only):

Snecma and its partners are moving to commit more resources to the powerplant for Europe's A400M to prevent the engine effort, and the airlifter program itself, from falling behind schedule [emphasis added].

Marc Ventre, the new head of Snecma's propulsion business, says the EuroPropulsion consortium building the A400M's TP400-B6 turboprop has met all milestones to date, but has fallen behind on total accumulated hours on the bench. EuroPropulsion comprises Snecma, Rolls-Royce, MTU and ITP of Spain.

To deal with the problem, the consortium is adding two test articles to the nine units already earmarked for the test bench program, and increasing the number of benches to six from five. Ventre says the move is related to an unspecified production hiccup, and no design glitches have been encountered.

He asserts that all performance targets, including engine mass and fuel consumption, are "right to spec," and that the consortium should meet the first-quarter 2007 schedule for the first flight on board a C-130 flying testbed.

It has long been recognized that the 11,000-hp. TP400--the most powerful Western turboprop ever built--represents one of the greatest risk areas of the A400M, and any slippage in development is likely to impact the program itself.

An audit of the project recently turned up the need to urgently target more engineering and other resources to a number of high-risk program areas, including the powerplant, to avoid impacting the schedule, which has already absorbed all available margin (AW&ST Dec. 11, 2006, p. 20). The aircraft is slated to make its first flight in March 2008.