Airbus Defence and Space, part of the global major aerospace group Airbus, announced on Wednesday that it had delivered the one and only A400M military airlift aircraft ordered by the tiny European country of Luxembourg. The aircraft was handed over to the Luxembourg Armed Forces at Seville in Spain, where the A400M final assembly line is located. This makes Luxembourg the seventh operator of the aircraft.

The aircraft, known to the company as MSN104, will be operated by a binational Belgian-Luxembourgeois squadron, which will be based at Melsbroek in Belgium. (The Belgian Air Component – as that country’s air force is officially designated – has seven A400Ms on order.)

“I welcome Luxembourg to the growing A400M user community,” said Airbus Defence and Space Military Aircraft head Alberto Gutierrez. “With 94 aircraft in service, the A400M is increasingly becoming the air mobility backbone of our customers, both in civil and military environments, as seen in recent Covid-19 crisis missions around the globe.”

In recent months additional capabilities have been cleared for use by the A400M. One of these is the ability to despatch up to 116 paratroopers in two groups through both side doors at the same time. The aircraft can now also drop a single 16 t load automatically, by parachute extraction, while 25 t can be gravity dropped.

Further, a 19 t pallet-mounted cargo can be manually combat-offloaded on an unpaved runway in one pass. With two passes, this capacity increases to 25 t. Airbus describes this capability as “unprecedented”.

In addition, the A400M can now undertake automatic low level flight in visual meteorological conditions and is the only military transport aircraft able to do so. And progress is being made with regard to the air-to-air refuelling of helicopters by the A400M. The aircraft recently made its first ‘wet contacts’ with an Airbus H225M helicopter (that is, the helicopter successfully received fuel from the A400M).