By Tim Hepher<\/p>\n
May 20 (Reuters) – European aerospace group Airbus on Tuesday talked up progress in designing systems for future combat aircraft to operate together, even as it faces a deadlock with France’s Dassault Aviation over \u200cEurope’s next warplane.<\/p>\n
The comments by CEO Guillaume Faury come as Airbus seeks to keep its options open on \u200calternative projects and alliances while France, Germany and Spain consider whether to scrap the \u20ac100-billion ($116 billion) FCAS fighter project.<\/p>\n
Speaking at an Airbus event in Germany, Faury said \u200bthe three governments were still considering the future of the project, which centres on a core fighter jet supported by drones and linked by a classified “combat cloud”.<\/p>\n
“The fighter that is at the core of the difficulties today, there are different ways forward, and I would leave it to governments to reflect and decide what they want to do,” Faury told the Airbus Defence Summit.<\/p>\n
Defence sources say \u200ctalks to resolve a dispute between Airbus \u2060and Dassault over the Dassault-led core fighter have stalled. Airbus has suggested splitting the programme into two jets while retaining the connective nervous system for which it leads development.<\/p>\n
“I am optimistic for FCAS \u2060as a system. At Airbus, we continue to collaborate (and) work with different countries,” Faury said.<\/p>\n
Germany has said it could build a fighter alone, while defence sources say Airbus has approached Sweden’s Saab or a rival project backed by BAE Systems and Leonardo.<\/p>\n
Airbus officials stressed that \u200bFCAS – \u200balso known by its French initials SCAF – was much more than a \u200bfighter jet.<\/p>\n
“That\u2019s the position of any prime contractor, \u200cparticularly in Europe \u2013 you don\u2019t want to be cut out of the systems integration part of the chain,” said Agency Partners’ Sash Tusa.<\/p>\n
SPECIFICATIONS DEBATE<\/p>\n
Speaking at a Eurofighter factory, Faury questioned whether Airbus and Dassault could overcome their months-long dispute.<\/p>\n
“At Airbus, we have collaborations with Leonardo and BAE Systems in the Eurofighter … and it’s working,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But not all companies are capable of cooperating with each other. That’s the difficulty we’re facing today.”<\/p>\n
Dassault declined to comment. It has previously said it is willing to cooperate \u200cbut wants clearer lines of control, with Dassault driving the core fighter \u200band Airbus having an equally large role on other systems.<\/p>\n
Faury hinted the \u200bindustrial spat is not the only source of disagreement \u200bin the FCAS project, launched in 2017 before the war in Ukraine reshaped Europe’s defence priorities.<\/p>\n
At the \u200ctime, budget-constrained militaries were more willing to compromise \u200bto cut costs, he said. But \u200brising security risks have sharpened differences over specifications.<\/p>\n
“Armed forces really want to get to the point where they will face an enemy, and they want their systems to really reach the objective, so maybe it’s less easy to \u200bmake compromises between different types of needs,” \u200cFaury said.<\/p>\n
France left the Eurofighter project in the 1980s and went alone with the Rafale, in part due \u200bto its need for a lighter, carrier-compatible fighter – priorities that analysts say still partly apply today.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8605 \u200beuros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Tim Hepher. Editing by David Goodman and Mark Potter)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Tim Hepher May 20 (Reuters) – European aerospace group Airbus on Tuesday talked up progress in designing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[90,12119,11912,12120,4230,10598,6026],"class_list":["post-14669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-airbus","tag-airbus","tag-core-fighter","tag-dassault-aviation","tag-designing-systems","tag-fcas","tag-fighter-jet","tag-guillaume-faury"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}