Today there were farewell flypasts by the Hercules transport plane across the UK, as the workhorse aircraft leaves RAF service. From the end of this month, we will be heavily reliant on the A400M Atlas: and this is not a happy prospect.

The American-made Hercules has a long and glorious history with the RAF. The A400M’s history, by contrast, is long and inglorious. Like most of Britain’s defence procurement disasters, it is a European collaboration in which the manufacturing is distributed across France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Turkey and the UK. The Ministry of Defence issued its requirement for new transport planes just 30 years ago in 1993: with the usual sort of speed one expects from a Euro-collaborative defence project, the first plane arrived with the RAF more than two decades later in 2014. Our last one, the 22nd, was finally delivered last month.

We won’t be getting any more. The National Audit Office described the A400M as “unaffordable” last year, and this does seem reasonable. The MoD claims that the procurement cost of the ones we have was £120m per plane; the reality is probably considerably worse as the development of the aircraft was catastrophically bungled. At one point the prime contractor, Airbus, said it was so badly overbudget that it would have to be cancelled unless the purchasing nations stumped up more money, and secret multinational negotiations took place which involved various extra payments and loans.

It seems likely that a good deal of extra money beyond £120m per plane was paid by the UK taxpayer but recorded under other headings. Some years ago France said that the unit cost of its A400Ms would be around £150m; it doesn’t seem plausible that the French would agree to pay more than us.

This is distressing, as you can buy a brand new, much-upgraded “Super” Hercules with a full spares and support package for £145m at the moment. Support costs for aircraft are several times procurement costs, so this equates to procurement cost of £50m at most.

Yes, the A400M can carry more than a Hercules: but you can buy three Hercules delivering even more lift for the same money we spent on each of our Atlases. And if you had three Hercules all of them would probably be working: if you had an A400M it would probably not.

The A400M is spectacularly unreliable. In 2015, when the plane had been in production for four years, a new aircraft crashed on its first flight due to a software problem and killed four of the six people on board. In 2017, a visit to Lithuania by German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen was derailed embarrassingly when her A400M broke down.

As of 2019, Parliament was told that just two of the RAF’s then 20-strong A400M fleet were typically available to fly. Maintenance staff described the aircraft as “a dog”. In 2021 an A400M carrying Covid vaccines to Ascension Island broke down twice, almost causing the vaccines to go out of date.

More recently it was reported that three of the four A400Ms used in the Sudan evacuation operation developed faults, and that two-thirds of our current fleet remained unavailable to fly as of early May. Just last month, flight tracking websites showed an A400M on a routine flight over Gloucestershire suddenly losing altitude before changing its transponder “squawk” code to 7700 – indicating a serious emergency – before landing minutes later at RAF Brize Norton.

The advantages of the A400M over the Hercules – its heaver payload, bigger cargo bay and greater speed – are primarily of use for longer-haul “air bridge” flights, as between the UK and a far-flung theatre of war. But these long flights are not suited to turboprop aircraft like the A400M: they’re better done using heavyweight jet transports like the C-17 Globemaster. Uniquely among European nations, the UK has a few of these: we bought them for £200m each including support, in other words for equivalent procurement cost equivalent to £70m – less than half what it costs us to buy an A400M. And a C-17 is much, much bigger and faster still.

It couldn’t be clearer that the A400M is abysmal value for money and not very good either for long-haul air bridge work or shorter tactical trips within theatre – as from Kabul to Camp Bastion in recent times – a task for which the Hercules was ideal. We should have fleets of proper US-made C-17s and new Hercules, rather than being stuck with A400Ms which cost more even than hugely bigger C-17s and aren’t much good for any job even on the rare days when they are working.

US-made C-17s and Hercules would also be better because you can easily get parts and support for them all over the world: this is clearly not going to be the case with the A400M. And just to round things off, the new head of the RAF has admitted that various special-forces missions which the Hercules could carry out – such as air delivery of boats or vehicles – cannot be done by the A400M. Sorting this out will take years.

Why did we ever buy this horrifyingly expensive, unreliable monstrosity? Why didn’t we bail out when we could?

As usual, the answer is porkbarrel politics. The wings for the A400M are made in Britain, and the jobs of those workers have been deemed more important than having working aeroplanes.

It’s worth noting here that FOI responses have established that the MoD believes that around 18 per cent of A400M procurement money has been spent in the UK, equating to say £23m per plane. We could have spent that money on something British-made which is actually useful – Accuracy International sniper rifles, Supacat Jackal offroad gun trucks, military engineering vehicles from JCB, we make lots of good kit in the UK. We could then have bought two new Hercules for every A400M. Overall, we’d still have saved more than £600m compared to buying the A400Ms, got the same amount of lift in twice as many planes which actually work – and spent just as much in Britain.

And indeed we would, buying American Hercules, spend still more in Britain. One of the UK’s genuine aerospace success stories is the firm Marshalls of Cambridge, which maintains the RAF’s Hercules and improves our balance of payments by looking after those of other nations. An expanded Hercules fleet would have been good news for Cambridge. As it is, job losses are expected at Marshalls, and the nice export work probably can’t survive without the core RAF business.

We’re getting job losses anyway, despite having bought the dreadful A400M specifically to preserve jobs: we can’t even manage porkbarrel politics properly.

Back in 2010, when it was decided that the A400M nations would bail out the disastrous project rather than abandoning it, then French defence minister Hervé Morin argued that “Giving it up would have meant Europe saying it wanted to be dependent on the United States in military transport”.

There’s just one problem with that idea: the A400M has plenty of US parts in it. The programme was opened to US suppliers early on, as one would expect, because a modern high-tech aircraft without US parts in it is no more likely than a computer without some US software in it. Like almost every other modern Western military system the A400M is subject to Washington’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and cannot even be sold to anyone without US consent.

So regardless of M Morin’s thoughts, Europe remains dependent on the USA in military transport: particularly as it has no C-17s.

There really is absolutely nothing to be said for the A400M or our purchase of it. In 2010, Labour peer John Gilbert, a former defence procurement minister, described the A400M in the House of Lords as “a Euro-w**king makework project”.

How right he was. And how sad and stupid it is that we are letting the trusty Hercules go.