SerpApi.Org
Germany is pushing to join Britain’s £50bn future fighter-jet programme after pulling out of a deal with France.
The country’s biggest warplane maker told the Farnborough Air Show on Wednesday that the EU powerhouse should join forces with Britain, Italy and Japan on the new Tempest stealth jet plan after a rival French agreement was dropped.
Michael Schoellhorn, the head of Airbus’s Munich-based defence arm, said if Germany had enough influence over the programme and a share of the work, it could be tempted to join Britain in developing the new jets.
“What we’re ready to do is to join something or to build something where we have a significant portion of the work and the leadership. That’s currently being explored,” he said.
Germany has been forced to consider joining Tempest, known in military circles as the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), after Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, announced in May that he was pulling out of a fighter pact with France.
The Franco-German plan, known as the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), was a coalition between Airbus’s Munich division and Dassault, but the plan fell apart after a public spat about the division of work.
The failed venture was established shortly after the 2016 Brexit vote, when Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron instructed Airbus and Dassault to team up in a rebuff to London.
Before that, Germany’s Airbus had partnered with the UK’s BAE Systems and Italy’s Leonardo to form the Eurofighter consortium, which makes the Typhoon warplane.
BAE responded by forming GCAP with Italy’s Leonardo and Mitsubishi of Japan.
Mr Schoellhorn said that in an ideal world, Eurofighter would have survived the schism over Brexit and formed the basis of a European grouping to develop a next-generation warplane.
He said: “If we do a mental exercise and project ourselves back to 2017, and we would not have started the old FCAS, then likely we would have continued with the Eurofighter team.
“That would have been an organic answer. But time has passed. There’s a project that has already started; Japan has joined. So, to be determined.”
In a sign that Germany is considering joining GCAP, Mr Schoellhorn said an arrangement reflecting Germany’s contribution, with Germany potentially ordering 150 planes, would be required.
He said that amid the “disappointment” regarding the failure of the FCAS, there was “obviously relief that the impasse is behind us and now we can open a new chapter”.
While Germany may feel encouraged by Canada’s admission to GCAP this week, it is thought that the observer status it was granted would not be enough to satisfy Berlin.
In an indication of competing factors at play, Lorenzo Mariani, the chief executive of Leonardo, said at the air show that Germany would be a useful addition to GCAP in terms of industrial capacity and financing.
However, he warned against any delays from discussions about work share.
Asked about the collapse of FCAS, Guillaume Faury, the chief executive of Airbus, said the toxic relationship with Dassault had to end while acknowledging that it had left his firm isolated.
He said: “We had come to the conclusion that it was not working. When you are in deadlock, you have to move forward. So from that perspective I think it was important to turn that page.
“But now there’s uncertainty again, so we have to write a new page. So I don’t really feel happy or not happy. But it had to go through this milestone to get to something else.”
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