* Redesign seeks to break with past national disputes
* Still in trade row over national funding system
* Latest European company to play down national roots
By Tim Hepher
PARIS, Sept 17 (Reuters) - European aerospace group EADS unveiled a new brand image on Friday, ridding its public profile of the last traces of its main French and German founders as the Airbus parent seeks to bury past disunity.
The new company logo was unveiled on its website (www.eads.com) with little fanfare, but the underlying drive towards integration of cross-border assets addresses a sensitive issue for investors and the company's 100,000 staff.
Europe's largest aerospace company has been rocked by Franco-German in-fighting and other internal tensions, during much of its 10-year history since coming into being through a merger of strategic assets from jetliners to ballistics.
Chief Executive Louis Gallois, appointed in 2007 following a deal between France and Germany to simplify the company's structure and ease tensions which had peaked over delays to the A380 superjumbo, has declared an end to nationalism inside EADS.
In a statement, he said the logo symbolised EADS unity.
He said it would also reinforce the group's four divisions: commercial planemaker Airbus, helicopter manufacturer Eurocopter, space division Astrium and the defence business which is being renamed Cassidian.
The logo's redesign gets rid of the star and swooshing double-arrow inherited from EADS's founders: aerospace firms DASA of Germany and Aerospatiale-Matra of France, respectively.
Details of the move to bury national symbols at the company, whose development is sometimes described as a barometer of wider European efforts towards political and economic integration, were first reported by Reuters last week.
Several other high-profile European companies have abandoned national connections over the years in order to appeal to global consumers or embark on foreign acquisitions, including Britain's BAE Systems, BP and France's Thales.
EADS shares rose more than 2 percent on Friday.
Gallois told the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington earlier this month EADS had come of age. Yet the redesign comes as EADS remains mired in a transatlantic dispute over the way it receives national funding from the countries which founded Airbus 40 years ago.
EADS incorporated Airbus when it was founded in 2000.
The European Union claimed victory this week after sources said a preliminary World Trade Organization ruling found that Boeing had received several billion dollars in federal and state subsidies.
Boeing said that if reports were correct, the WTO findings meant Airbus had received significantly greater support through government loans which the WTO had already ruled illegal. Both sides are appealing these earlier findings. (Editing by David Holmes)