France intends to order four additional Airbus A400M Atlas transport aircraft as the French Air and Space Force looks to expand the type’s role into emerging missions such as electronic warfare, intelligence, and long-range strike.
The purchase, outlined in governmental budget documents and first reported by Opex360, would lift the French Air and Space Force fleet to 41 A400Ms, in line with the 2024-2030 Military Programming Law (LPM).
The order follows commitments made at Paris Air Show 2025, when Airbus and the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR) moved to secure the A400M production line, with France and Spain signaling follow-on support.
Some of the new Atlas airframes could be earmarked for specialized units. Intelligence Online reported in July 2025 that the French Ministry of Armed Forces is considering assigning aircraft to the Mixed Air Group 56 Vaucluse, which operates for France’s foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, to replace its aging C-130H Hercules airframes.
From heavy lifter to multi-role aircraft
Airbus is actively repositioning the A400M beyond its original transport role. At the Paris Air Show 2025, Jean-Brice Dumont, Airbus Head of Military Air Systems, said operators increasingly view the Atlas as a valuable source of operational data, describing it as “a data collector.”
Future configurations could raise the aircraft’s payload margin to around 40 tons, enabling the carriage of dozens of small UAVs or a smaller number of larger drones. The aircraft is also being studied for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and electronic warfare (EW) missions, using modular systems that can be rapidly installed to collect or relay data across the battlespace.
This would effectively turn the Atlas into an airborne multi-mission platform: a “drone mothership”, data hub, and communications node within a broader system-of-systems network.
In February 2022, an A400M achieved a key proof of concept when it successfully launched a drone from its open cargo ramp during a test flight in northern Germany. The drone remained linked to the Atlas’s onboard systems, transmitting data in real time, demonstrating the aircraft’s potential as a carrier platform within the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) ecosystem.
Growing interest in massed, palletized drones and missiles
At Paris Air Show 2025, MBDA presented a display labelled “Generic Airdropped Munition Pallet” next to a French A400M. The exhibit showed a standardized pallet fitted with a mix of payloads, including cruise missiles, Mistral surface-to-air missiles, and loitering munitions.
Recent reporting also highlights commercial partnerships pushing massed loitering munitions. A collaboration between French defense group Thales and Swiss startup Destinus was recently signed, with aims to develop palletized, airdroppable kamikaze drones designed for mass deployment.
The evolving A400M ambitions mirror a broader trend among advanced air forces seeking to extract new combat effects from transport fleets.
The US Air Force’s Rapid Dragon program has already demonstrated the ability to launch JASSM-ER cruise missiles from unmodified C-130 and C-17 aircraft using palletized deployment boxes, effectively turning cargo aircraft into standoff strike platforms. Follow-on trials in Norway in 2022 confirmed the concept’s viability in an operational environment.
In parallel, Japan’s Ministry of Defense is pursuing a similar idea for the Kawasaki C-2, studying roll-on/roll-off modules for launching long-range standoff missiles, including an air-launched variant of the Type 12 anti-ship missile.
