Airbus A400 Million Transport Plane Crashes in Spain, Killing Four -- 3rd Update

By Christopher Bjork in Madrid and Robert Wall in London 

An Airbus Group NV military transport plane crashed near Seville, southern Spain, killing four of the people on board, the Spanish government said Saturday.

A government official in Seville said the aircraft was carrying six people and crashed in a field about a mile north of Seville's airport, catching fire upon impact. Two people were sent to the hospital with very serious injuries, she said.

An Airbus spokesman confirmed the crash of an A400M transport plane that was due for delivery to the Turkish air force. The European plane maker has dispatched technical experts to the scene, he said.

Earlier in the day, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said as many as 10 people were feared killed in the crash. He said the crew appeared to be Airbus workers, not military personnel. Airbus personnel typically perform a series of test flights of planes before the aircraft are delivered to customers.

The crash is the first of an A400M military airlifter, which Airbus assembles at a plant in Seville. The company said it was coordinating with relevant authorities and had activated its crash crisis team.

It is the second big military airplane tragedy in Spain this year. In January, a Greek combat jet crashed on takeoff during a military exercise, killing the two pilots and eight people on the ground.

The U.K. Defense Ministry said it had temporarily stopped flying its two A400M transport planes as a precautionary measure until more is known about why the aircraft went down.

Airbus has struggled with development and production of the four-engine turbo-propeller plane. The program has run over cost and behind schedule. Airbus Chief Executive Tom Enders has apologized for the problems in building the plane.

The crash comes during another difficult period for the program. Airbus in January replaced the head of the military aircraft unit because of sustained technical and production problems. The company's 2014 full-year results included a EUR551 million ($618 million) charge related to problems building the plane.

Airbus has sold 174 of the military cargo planes, with orders from eight countries. The first was delivered to the French air force in 2013. Turkey, the U.K. and Germany are among the countries to have received A400M planes.

The plane maker was starting to aggressively promote the plane in export markets around the world in the hope of securing more orders. Airbus officials have said the company won't make money on the plane unless it secures additional deals after the development program ran billions of dollars over cost. Airbus at one point considered abandoning the program.

Airbus also has had to contend with recent accidents in its civil airplane unit, after an AirAsia A320 jetliner crashed in December and a similar plane operated by Deutsche Lufthansa AG's budget arm Germanwings went down in March. Neither crash has been linked to faults at Airbus. Investigators into the Germanwings crash suspect the copilot of deliberately crashing the plane. An accident report on the AirAsia crash in Indonesia is still pending.

Write to Robert Wall at [e-mail]

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