Superjumbo soars into history books

THE world’s largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380, completed its maiden flight yesterday over the Pyrenees.

There was applause as the double-decked, 308-ton plane landed successfully at the Toulouse-Blagnac airport in southwestern France at 2.22pm (1.22pm Irish time) after a flight of nearly four hours.

About 30,000 spectators watched the white plane with blue tail take off and touch down. Before it landed, its front lights shining, the A380 did a slow flyover above the airport, where it had taken off at 10.29am (11.29am Irish time).

As the aircraft flew over the airport, its immense size became more apparent. The chase plane following the A380 showed up as a speck on the blue skyline compared to the new giant of the air.

The plane carried a crew of six and 22 tons of on-board test instruments. It can carry as many as 840 passengers on commercial flights.

“The take-off was absolutely perfect,” chief test pilot Jacques Rosay said by radio from the A380 cockpit as he flew at 10,000 feet just north of the Pyrenees mountains, about an hour into the flight.

Mr Rosay, co-pilot Claude Lelaie and four fellow crew members took no chances - donning parachutes for the first flight. A handrail inside the test plane lead from the cockpit to an escape door that could have been jettisoned had the pilots lost control. The flight capped 11 years of preparation and €10 billion in spending.

The A380 weighed 464 tons on take-off, including fuel, making it the heaviest take-off in civilian aviation history. Spectators camped out to witness Europe’s biggest aviation event since Concorde’s maiden flight in 1969.

Airbus says the A380 test-flight programme is likely to take over a year.

Problems are more likely, but still rare, later in the test-flight programme, when the pilots take the plane to its limits. An Airbus A330 prototype crashed here in July 1994, killing chief test pilot Nick Warner and six others. The A380, with a catalogue price of €217 million, represents a huge gamble by Airbus.

So far, Airbus has booked 154 orders for the A380, which it says will carry passengers 5% farther than Boeing’s longest-range 747 jumbo at a per-passenger cost up to one-fifth lower.

But Airbus has yet to prove it can turn a profit on its investments. Some analysts say signs of a boom in the market for smaller, long-range jets like Boeing’s long-range 787 Dreamliner show Airbus was wrong to focus resources on the superjumbo.