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 on its first flight. The aircraft, which was due for delivery
to the Turkish air force in June, took off at 12:45 p.m. local time
and crashed about 15 minutes later, Airbus said.
The Spanish air-accident authority, or CIAIAC, is leading the
probe into the cause of the crash. Airbus said it had dispatched
technical experts to the scene to support the investigation.
All six on board were Airbus employees and Spanish nationals,
the company said in a statement. Airbus personnel typically perform
a series of test flights before aircraft are delivered to
customers.
The crash is the first of an A400M military airlifter, which
Airbus assembles at a plant in Seville.
Like commercial airlines, the A400M is equipped with black boxes
that record conversations between pilots and the functioning of
system. Those two recording devices, which are designed to be able
to withstand crashes and fires, could prove crucial in determining
the cause of the crash.
Investigators will also rely on information from air-traffic
control to reconstruct what happened. Plane-tracking website
Flightradar24 said the aircraft crashed at 12:57 p.m. local time
after reaching a maximum altitude of 1,725 feet and then descending
at a constant speed of about 160 knots, or 184 miles an hour.
The crash 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. The German air
force, which has one such plane, said it was monitoring the
situation. France, the largest operator of A400Ms, said it wasn't
grounding the plane at this point.
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, which cost
about $170 million each, with orders from eight countries. The
first was delivered to the French air force in 2013, a decade after
its development began. 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. Malaysia is the sole export customer at this point.
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 robert.wall@wsj.com
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