LONDON – Incorrectly installed engine control software caused the fatal crash of an A400M airlifter in Spain on May 9, a seniorAirbus Group official says.
In an interview with the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt, Airbus Chief Strategy Officer Marwan Lahoud said the incorrect installation took place during final assembly of the aircraft, which led to engine failure and the resulting crash.
Lahoud said that data extracted from the flight data recorder this week and seen by Airbus engineers confirmed the internal hypothesis that there had been no problem with the aircraft.
“The black boxes attest to that there are no structural defects [with the aircraft], but we have a serious quality problem in the final assembly,” Lahoud told the newspaper.
The news emerged two days after Airbus CEO Tom Enders criticized Spanish agencies for withholding the flight recorder data.
“We would like to see the data and compare it with our hypothesis and proceed quickly to understand the causes of accident, so our aircraft can get back into the air,” he told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Amsterdam on May 27.
Four Airbus Defense and Space flight-test personnel died when MSN23, an A400M destined for the Turkish air force, crashed during its first flight from Seville’s San Pablo Airport. The aircraft suffered technical problems shortly after takeoff and came down on agricultural land just north of the airport.
The accident cause hypothesis prompted the company to send out an Alert Operator Transmission on May 19 to the five A400M operating air arms, which requested all operators to perform one-time specific checks on the electronic control units (ECUs) fitted to each engine on the aircraft before the next flight.
For Airbus, the findings will come as a relief, as a hardware issue on the aircraft or in the Europrop International TP400 engines would have resulted in costly delays. But it may be several more days before A400M operators are satisfied with the cause and return to operations. Of the five A400M operators, only France has continued flying its fleet of six aircraft. Germany, Malaysia, Turkey and the U.K. are still pausing flight operations.
Spanish authorities are still withholding the company’s permit to test fly new-production aircraft from Seville, but flight tests of the prototypes are continuing.