A400m

[kato]

But there was also good news for the Luftwaffe, their 50th A400M is just delivered.

That back in August was the 49th delivered btw - but the 50th ordered, with Luftwaffe designation "54+50".

The reason is that the A400M with the Luftwaffe designation "54+35" (i.e. the 35th unit) was temporarily retained by Airbus and used as a testbed for integration of Elbit's J-MUSIC DIRCM system for the Luftwaffe. It's planned to refit this system on a further 23 German A400M during their regular maintenance overhaul intervals over the next six years; order for this by Germany was signed in June for the A400M. The same system is also being installed on Luftwaffe C-130J and A350 (one of which already has it installed).

Following completion of testing "54+35" was delivered as the actual 50th unit five weeks later on September 11th. The remaining 3 ordered aircraft are planned for delivery next year.

 

[kato]

German A400M did a rapid response deployment to Venezuela on friday, with four aircraft flying across the Atlantic to Caracas with humanitarian supplies, a THW HUSAR platoon and a HUSAR platoon from volunteer organizations. A fifth A400M followed later with around 9 tons supplies for the THW team, a sixth A400M was kept in reserve and took off for Venezuela from Germany today. The group of aircraft landed 38 hours after planning for the deployment first started, 13 hours of that was flight time.

The A400M moved on from Caracas to Aruba. One will stay deployed there for Medevac for the rest of the week, the other three are transport versions and used to shuttle supplies and additional disaster response teams between Curacao and Venezuela. First such shuttle flight was done on Sunday, picking up another THW unit and supplies brought there by a A330 MRTT.

Turkey also deployed two A400M with aid to Venezuela, not sure if they are staying in theater though. Unlike the German aircraft I haven't seen any spotters in the Dutch Carribean mention the Turkish ones.

Caracas Airport is currently officially closed to civilian aircraft, partly due to damage. Some countries do still directly land there to bring in supplies, e.g. Spain with an A330 MRTT, the RAF with a Voyager or Vietnam with a civilian A350-900. Others - e.g. the Czech Republic with a NATO MMF A330 MRTT flight - aim for Curacao instead.

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The same German Air Force transport wing performed a non-stop flight of an A400M to Hawaii the same week (last tuesday apparently). It used buddy air-to-air refueling from a second A400M taking off with it, and from a third A400M forward stationed in Alaska. The A400M carried two crews that switched mid-flight for the 17-hour trip. The flight also was a training flight for navigation in arctic airspace; it went from Germany via Norway across the North Pole straight to Alaska and then on to Hawaii.

While longer flights have been performed with A400M - the RAF has flown nonstop to Guam before with 22 hours flight time - one focus of the deployment was on only using A400M for the refueling instead of relying on dedicated German or Allied tanker aircraft.

 

[kato]

The remaining 3 ordered aircraft are planned for delivery next year.

The last of 53 Luftwaffe A400M was delivered on April 26th btw.

The three aircraft are not designated 54+51 to 54+53 (as they should be in the same order as the first 50), but instead 54+61, 54+62 and 54+63. The designations for them are part of some appeal to tradition to call back to LTG 61, LTG 62, LTG 63, i.e. the originally three German air transport wings.

All German A400M today are part of LTG 62. The other two were dissolved in 2017 and 2021 respectively with the retirement of their last C-160. Germany originally - until ca 1967 - was planning with much larger numbers of transport aircraft, hence why there were three full air transport wings. When numbers were cut - by half with the switch to C-160 - helicopter squadrons were attached to some of them instead. "64" was a helicopter transport wing, "65" was a (short-lived) wing for all air transport aircraft taken over from East Germany.