The Clean Sky initiative, backed with enormous bundles of EU taxpayers’ money, published its first call for proposals today. But how clean is Clean Sky? Here is an article I wrote for the UK magazine Private Eye more or less two years ago when Clean Sky was being put together:

The European Commission has handed what amounts to a £540 million bung to the aviation industry. The plane makers are increasingly feeling the regulatory heat over climate change, and the Commission wants to include aviation in its Emissions Trading Scheme from 2011. The so-called ‘Clean Sky’ subsidy – for research and development to make planes cleaner and greener – will help soften the blow.

It’s not the first time the Commission has used the environment as an excuse to hand taxpayers’ money to vastly profitable aircraft makers, despite the EU Treaty containing a ‘polluter pays’ principle. Airbus, for example, was given cash through the LIFE programme to improve its environmental performance shortly before BAE Systems’ sale of its 20 percent stake in the company. But the payout this time is of a much larger scale.

Furthermore, a number of the companies playing a prominent role in the initiative are better known for military, rather than civil, aviation. These include French favourites Dassault (whose revenues come from defence and executive jets) and Thales, plus Sweden’s Saab, which earns 80 percent of its revenues from defence. Bizarrely, considering this is EU money, another beneficiary will be Israel Aerospace Industries Limited, which among other things maintains the jets of the Israeli Air Force.

The Commission is banned from funding military projects but, a spokesperson admits, new intellectual property will remain in the hands of the companies involved and there is nothing to stop it being transferred to military use. As long as any spin-offs are “applicable to civilian aircraft,” the fruit of the research “is for the companies to deal with as they wish.”

I think this more or less still stands. Regarding the involvement of Israel Aerospace Industries Limited (2008 sales US$3.6 billion, 61 percent to the ‘defense sector’), here is a nice quote from their website: ‘The importance of business segments such as Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) and Homeland Security (HLS) has grown considerably worldwide and consequently IAI is investing more resources and efforts to leverage its solutions in these areas.’ Good to see EU funds are giving them a helpful leg-up!