It's more bad news for the Airbus 400M: Europe's planned showpiece heavy military air transport aircraft is now nearly four years behind schedule and almost $6.5 billion over budget.

The aircraft was planned to be the first 21st century, major military airlifter that could compete in the international arms market with the venerable veteran giants from the United States: the Boeing (formerly McDonnell-Douglas) C-17 Globemaster and the Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules.

But instead, the A400M is now at least another three years from delivery, French newspaper Le Figaro reported last week.

As UPI's Leander Schaerlaeckens reported from Brussels Monday, the ambitious military airlifter was planned to make the major European nations independent of U.S.-supplied aircraft for significant power projection outside the EU area. However, it has been plagued by huge cost overruns, production bottlenecks and problems with engine development.

According to Le Figaro, the aircraft will now not be available to the several European air forces that have ordered it until late 2012, when it should have entered service this year.

As Schaerlaeckens reported, production costs for the aircraft have escalated a further $6.42 billion, which Airbus itself will have to absorb. Airbus has suffered comparably huge development and production delays and cost overruns on its next-generation A380 super-jumbo airliner.

Even worse for Airbus and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., the A400M's woes may very well undermine the hopes of EADS and its American partner, Northrop Grumman, that they can still win the contract for the next generation of long-range aerial refueling tankers with their KC-45A aircraft -- an adapted version of the Airbus A330.

EADS and Northrop Grumman were actually awarded the contract during the last year of the Bush administration, beating out Boeing and its KC-767 air tanker. But the U.S. Congress, in a very rare move, voided the contract and ordered the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force to run the competition and comparative assessments of the two aircraft all over again.

One of the biggest arguments that Boeing and its supporters claimed was not adequately assessed in the first competition was that EADS and Airbus had never before built such an ambitious military aircraft. The European aerospace industry has different plants scattered across many different countries in the European Union, all of them speaking different languages.

Skeptics therefore argued that whatever timetables and budgets the European companies offered for the KC-767, they would be rendered meaningless by endless bottlenecks and other delays. The sad story of the A400M has been proving these predictions all too true.

Boeing has successfully retained the U.S. Air Force's aging but still very airworthy fleet of KC-135s for nearly a half-century -- since the Eisenhower administration, in fact. But EADS has never built either a heavy military airlifter or a long-range refueling tanker before. If it continues to fall behind schedule on the air tanker, fears are bound to grow that the same thing will happen on a far larger scale on the much more demanding long-range military lifter as well.

As things currently stand, the A400M is not scheduled to start its test flights until early 2010, with the first aircraft for operational use being delivered in late 2012. But large-scale deliveries of the aircraft to European air forces that are waiting for it therefore will not begin before 2014 at the earliest.

(Part 2: The A400M's engine problems)