“This is a unique aircraft. It is one of its kind,” is how Carlos Suárez, president of EADS Casa and chief executive of the group’s military transport aircraft division, summed up the company’s new A400M this year.

The description, although not unexpected coming from Mr Suárez, is much more than just a sales pitch. The A400M is Europe’s most important military transport project since the Franco-German Transall of the late 1950s.