Airbus A400M crash: Software fault confirmed as the cause

Airbus chief strategy officer confirms that a software bug brought down military transport plane

Plane maker Airbus last night admitted that the Airbus A400M that crashed at the beginning of May in Spain was brought down as a result of a software fault.

It said, however, that the problem was due to poorly configured software, rather than software bugs.

Marwan Lahoud, Airbus chief strategy officer, told German newspaper Handelsblatt that the 9 May crash near Seville's San Pablo Airport was not caused by structural defects or a manufacturing fault, but due to a misconfiguration of the software controlling the engines, which caused them to shut down when the pilot made a particular manoeuvre.

"The black boxes attest to that. There are no structural defects, but we have a serious quality problem in the final assembly," Lahoud told Handelsblatt.

The admission comes almost two weeks after Airbus issued an alert that suggested that the company had pinpointed software problems as a key cause of the crash. The alert warned operators of the aircraft to "perform one-time specific checks of the Electronic Control Units (ECU) on each of the aircraft's engines before next flight and introduces additional detailed checks to be carried out in the event of any subsequent engine or ECU replacement".

Airbus has yet to issue official confirmation of the Handelsblatt story and CEO Tom Enders has complained that the company's investigation has been hampered by the Spanish courts' retention of the "black box" data for their own investigation.

The plane crashed minutes into its first flight, killing all four Airbus employees on board. The aircraft, which has had a troublesome birth, has been sold to air forces in the UK, Germany, France and Turkey. Malaysia's air force also includes one A400M in its fleet.