The double-decked, 308-ton
plane landed successfully to applause at 2:22 p.m (8:22 a.m. EDT) after a
flight of nearly four hours. About 30,000 spectators watched the white plane
with blue tail take off and touch down, 101 years after the Wright brothers
achieved the first controlled, sustained flight.
Before it landed, its front
lights shining, the A380 did a slow flyover above the airport in Blagnac,
southwest France, where it had taken off at 10:29 a.m. (4:29 a.m. EDT).
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 takeoff was absolutely
perfect," chief test pilot Jacques Rosay told reporters 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. "The weather's wonderful."
The pilots checked the
plane's basic handling characteristics while the on-board equipment recorded
measurements for 150,000 separate parameters and beamed real-time data back to
computers on the ground.
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.
In Paris, French Cabinet
ministers broke into applause when President Jacques Chirac told them of the
successful start to the flight. The head of competitor Boeing's French
division, Yves Galland, said he watched the televised takeoff and, just this once, "shared the emotion of the
people of Airbus."
The flight capped 11 years
of preparation and $13 billion in spending.
Orville and Wilbur Wright,
by comparison, spent an estimated $1,000 developing their skeletal flyer, which
stayed airborne for 12 seconds on the sands of Kill Devil Hills, N.C., the
morning of Dec. 17, 1903.
Built of spruce and ash
covered with muslin, the Wright brothers' flyer weighed 605 pounds, according
to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
The A380 weighed 464 tons
on takeoff, including its bulky test equipment, fittings and fuel, Airbus said.
That is about 75 percent of its maximum authorized takeoff weight for
commercial flights.
Spectators camped out by
the airport to be there for what some said was Europe's biggest aviation event
since the first flight of the supersonic Concorde in 1969. About 30,000 people
gathered around the airport to watch, police said.
Emergency services took no
chances and stationed fire trucks at regular intervals along the runway,
although aviation experts say modern computer modeling and wind-tunnel tests
have made maiden flights safer than ever.
Problems are more likely,
but still very rare, later in the test-flight program, when the pilots
deliberately take the plane to its limits. An Airbus A330 prototype crashed
here in July 1994, killing chief test pilot Nick Warner and six others as they
conducted a simulated engine failure exercise.
Airbus says the A380 test-flight program
is likely to take over a year and finish soon before the plane enters service
for Singapore Airlines in mid-2006.
The A380, with a catalogue
price of $282 million, represents a huge bet by Airbus that airlines will need
plenty of large aircraft to transport passengers between ever-busier hub
airports.
So far, Airbus has booked
154 orders for the A380, which it says will carry passengers 5 percent farther
than Boeing's longest-range 747 jumbo at a per-passenger cost up to one-fifth
lower.
But Airbus has yet to prove
that it can turn a profit on its investment, a third of which came from
European governments. Some analysts say signs of a boom in the market for
smaller, long-range jets like Boeing's long-range 787 "Dreamliner" show that Airbus
was wrong to focus resources on the superjumbo at the expense of its own
mid-sized A350 - which enters service in 2010, two years after its Boeing
rival.
Just this week, Air Canada
and Air India announced a total of 82 new orders for Boeing jets - including 41
787s - taking Boeing's Dreamliner order book to 237.
But Airbus CEO Noel
Forgeard played down Boeing's recent orders and the 787's development lead,
saying the battle for the market in smaller planes would be fought out over 20
years, not two.
"Our competitor Boeing has
woken up and gets a wave of orders," Forgeard told reporters attending the A380
test flight. ''Good! Competition is an excellent thing."
Forgeard, who steps down
later this year to become joint CEO of Airbus parent European Aeronautic
Defense and Space Co., congratulated the A380 development and test-flight team
for a "fantastic collective effort" and said the plane would enter service in
the "second half of 2006" - about three months behind the previous schedule.
Part of the delay is down
to the superjumbo's struggle with a weight problem that consumed months of
engineering time and pushed the program's cost overrun to $1.88 billion. Competitive
pressure on airlines to offer plusher, heavier business-class seating tightened
the squeeze.
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