An executive of Airbus Group has confirmed that the crash of an Airbus A400M military transport was caused by a faulty software configuration. Marwan Lahoud, chief marketing and strategy officer for Airbus, told the German newspaper Handelsblatt on Friday that there was a "quality issue in the final assembly" of the components of the aircraft engine.

As Ars reported on May 19, Airbus had issued a warning to its military customers about a potential software problem in the engine control software for the A400M. The release of the exact cause of the crash, however, had been delayed because a Spanish magistrate placed the flight data recorders from the aircraft under seal. Airbus has since been able to obtain the flight data, which Lahoud said confirms that the engine control software had been improperly configured during the installation of the engines on the ill-fated aircraft.

"The black boxes attest to that," Lahoud told Handelsblatt. "There are no structural defects, but we have a serious quality problem in the final assembly." The error was not in the code itself, but in configuration settings programmed into the electronic control unit (ECU) of the engines.

If it holds up, the finding means that Airbus will be able to avoid a complete redesign of the A400M's engines—the largest turboprop engines ever manufactured in Europe. The Spanish aircraft was being used by the military there to conduct pre-acceptance testing on the aircraft, which has already suffered from numerous delays and cost overruns.