BLAGNAC, France, 28 April 2005 — Cheered by tens of thousands of onlookers, the world’s largest passenger plane touched down with puffs of smoke from its 22 outsize wheels, ending a historic maiden flight where it began, on a runway outside Toulouse, southwest France.
The Airbus A380’s four-hour sortie over the snowcapped Pyrenees, capped with a showy fly-past, removed any doubt that the behemoth capable of carrying up to 840 passengers can fly. But it did little to convince skeptics, led by US rival Boeing Co., that it can make money for the European aircraft maker.
About 30,000 people watched the takeoff and landing, police said, many from just outside the airport perimeter, where whole families had spent the night in caravans awaiting European aviation’s biggest spectacle since the supersonic Concorde’s first flight in 1969.
Applause reverberated across the airfield and adjacent Airbus headquarters as test pilots Claude Lelaie and Jacques Rosay emerged, waving happily, with their four fellow crew members.
Flying the plane was as easy as “riding a bicycle,” Rosay said. Engineer Fernando Alonso said the crew enjoyed an “extremely comfortable” flight.
“Now shareholders can sleep better at night,” chief flight engineer Gerard Desbois added.
The white jet with a blue tail carried 20 metric tons of onboard test instruments plus extra ballast to increase its total takeoff weight to 421 metric tons, or about 75 percent of its maximum authorized takeoff weight for commercial flights — but already a new record for a civil airliner. The crew plans to gradually increase the ballast over a further 2,500 hours of airborne tests.
Yesterday, they took no chances, donning parachutes. Fire trucks stood ready along the full length of the runway. During the trip, flight engineers checked the plane’s handling characteristics while the onboard hardware recorded measurements for 150,000 separate parameters, beaming real-time data back to computers on the ground.
In the impromptu fly-past announced less than an hour in advance, the A380 then passed over the runway at low speed, flaps extended, before banking confidently around for a second, final approach, tailed by a Corvette mini-jet which earlier filmed dramatic footage of the airborne “superjumbo” against a mountain backdrop.
