The two mediators appointed in mid-March to unlock the Système aérien du futur (SCAF) — Laurent Collet-Billon, former head of France's Direction générale de l'armement (DGA, the defence procurement agency), and Frank Haun, former chief of German tank maker Krauss-Maffei Wegmann — have delivered their reports. The ball is now in the court of the French and German governments, as the CEOs of Airbus Defence & Space and Dassault Aviation have stopped speaking to each other for months. Their talks with the industrial players focused on three axes: intellectual property, work share, and export rights.

The deadlock is unchanged. Dassault demands clearer industrial leadership on the combat-aircraft pillar, currently split equally between Dassault, Airbus Germany and Airbus Spain — a redistribution Berlin rejects. Emmanuel Macron hoped to save the programme announced with Angela Merkel in 2017, on which €3bn of studies have already been committed out of a €100bn total project. According to Handelsblatt, the mediators found no deal and Friedrich Merz wants a final call by Tuesday, ahead of the informal meeting of the 27 EU heads of state in Cyprus on Thursday and Friday. The French DGA, however, says "mediation is still ongoing".

In Germany, the aerospace industry and the IG Metall union are pushing for two separate aircraft, keeping common pillars for drones and a "combat cloud". Conservative MP Volker Mayer-Lay is calling for an immediate switch to the two-aircraft solution. Dassault CEO Eric Trappier had himself flagged the date at the early-April "Guerres et paix" forum: "We will meet again on 18 April". Source: Les Echos, 18 April 2026, Emmanuel Grasland and Anne Drif.