Airbus rejects backlash over tanker deal

PARIS (Reuters) - The chief executive of European planemaker Airbus (EAD.PA) said on Friday he was surprised at what he called a protectionist reaction in the United States to the award of a major U.S. air refueling tanker contract to a consortium including the European plane maker.

In a telephone interview with Reuters, Airbus CEO Tom Enders rejected criticism by some lawmakers that Airbus was responsible for destroying more jobs in the United States through domestic subsidies than it could create by assembling tankers there.

"That is a big nonsense. We are sourcing from the U.S. roughly $11 billion a year for EADS as a group, mostly for Airbus, and we are the single largest customer outside the U.S. for the U.S. aerospace and defence industry," he said.

"We are supporting a couple of hundred thousand of jobs in the US," he said, adding it was about 190,000 jobs.

The United States and European Union are suing each other in a trade spat over alleged subsidies, each saying the other side's policies threaten aviation jobs in their own backyard.

Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts said on Thursday it defied common sense for one branch of the U.S. government to challenge Airbus subsidies while another branch awards Airbus a big contract.

"We have 1,000 Airbuses flying with airlines in the U.S., so Airbus is contributing tremendously to the U.S. economy," Enders said. "This protectionist talk which you get in the U.S. or in Europe is completely out of synch with the realities of our industry and globalization."

The U.S. Air Force was briefing Boeing Co (BA.N) on Friday about why it lost the $35 billion tanker replacement program to the proposal from Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) and EADS.

HOME BASE ALABAMA

Enders was speaking by telephone from Mobile, Alabama, where Airbus plans to set up a plant to assemble nearly all the 179 tankers ordered from Airbus parent EADS and Northrop Grumman, as well as Airbus A330-200F freighters for the commercial market.

Sections of the planes will still be made in Europe. The KC-45A tanker will use the airframe of the Airbus A330 jetliner.

The tanker contract will add more than 1,000 jobs in Mobile and sustain employment in Europe, Enders said.

Airbus says the deal will add 1,000 U.S. assembly jobs on the tankers and 300 jobs on the freighters, while Northrop cites 2,000 direct new Alabama jobs including militarization work.

Enders called Alabama the "home base" for efforts to broaden the European planemaker's international footprint and hinted the U.S. state could end up accommodating more Airbus work later.

"Today we are in Mobile and celebrating the first new commercial aircraft final assembly line in 40 years, which will do tankers and freighters, and who knows, we will see what the perspective of that is," he said.

Those remarks could rattle nerves among French unions who see the deal as the start of a broader plan to move production to the dollar area to help combat a weak U.S. currency.

Enders said the latest drop in the U.S. dollar validated the European planemaker's ambition to shift production to dollar-zone countries but would not trigger big new layoffs.

He said Airbus was thinking about what to do about expanding its existing Power 8 restructuring plan, which is based on a euro-dollar exchange rate of $1.35 compared with nearly $1.55 on Friday, and includes 10,000 European job cuts.

"We are elaborating measures... It's not firing another 10,000 people or anything like that, but will have to do with more structural measures and clearly more internationalization.

"We want to spread our manufacturing risk and manufacturing base into the dollar area and particularly countries that are tied to the dollar. That strategy is absolutely right and if anything the deteriorating dollar is proving that," he said.

Assembly of A330 and A340 passenger jets will stay in Toulouse, France, where an Airbus spokeswoman said their joint assembly line employs 1,000 assembly workers.

Enders declined comment on whether Airbus's other big military program, the 20 billion euro A400M being developed for 7 European nations, faced another delay in its first flight. Reports say the transport plane will debut in October, not July as planned.

(Editing by Tim Dobbyn)