By Florence Loeve and Tim Hepher <\/p>\n
PARIS, July 1 (Reuters) – French planemaker Dassault Aviation is open to cooperation after the collapse of \u200ca Franco-German-Spanish fighter programme, its CEO said on Wednesday, while \u200cleaving open the prospect of working with a non-European partner. <\/p>\n
Eric Trappier was speaking in his \u200bfirst formal testimony since Germany and France last month scrapped a project to build a new-generation fighter following industrial disputes between Dassault and its main partner Airbus. <\/p>\n
“We are capable of cooperating, we have shown it in the past, \u200cbut we want to \u2060cooperate with rules that are accepted from the start,” he told a French Senate committee. <\/p>\n
Trappier said the collapse of \u2060the core fighter part of the FCAS project followed irreconcilable differences with Airbus, which has in turn blamed Dassault for the breakdown. <\/p>\n
Asked if France could press \u200bahead with \u200bits own fighter, as it did \u200bafter quitting the Eurofighter in \u200cthe 1980s, Trappier said, “We can do it alone, that’s possible, or we can find partners. Do these partners exclusively have to be European? That’s an open question.” <\/p>\n
There has been speculation that France could turn to Swedish planemaker Saab as a potential partner or team up with a Middle \u200cEast importing nation for the next generation \u200bof fighters due to budget constraints. Airbus is \u200balso courting Saab. <\/p>\n
In the \u200bshorter term, for the next version of Dassault’s existing Rafale \u200cfighter known as Rafale F5, Trappier \u200bsaid he hoped \u200bto receive a development contract by the end of the year. <\/p>\n
“We are studying the F5 with our partners now, which should entail \u200ba development contract by \u200cthe end of the year, if we want to maintain our \u200bschedule,” he said. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Florence Loeve and Tim Hepher; Editing \u200bby Elaine Hardcastle and Alexander Smith) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Florence Loeve and Tim Hepher PARIS, July 1 (Reuters) – French planemaker Dassault Aviation is open to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44323,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13060],"tags":[4616,18801,4664,2240,14692,5,5373,2199],"class_list":["post-44322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dassault-aviation","tag-airbus","tag-core-fighter","tag-dassault","tag-dassault-aviation","tag-eric-trappier","tag-france","tag-french-senate","tag-rafale-fighter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}