That the Airbuses can be flown here with seeming gay abandon is due in large part to their fly-by-wire Flight Envelope Protection systems that won't let the pilot get too close to the ragged edge.
Putting one of them through its paces here is Airbus chief test pilot Jacques Rosay, who made the first flights on the A318 and A340-500, and who may well appoint himself for similar honors in the 555-passenger A380 next year.
But first flights in fly-by-wire aircraft are, by their very nature, supposed to be routine.
"We will see the main problems in the simulator, and I am very confident we will solve them there," he told Show News. "That's where most of the testing will take place."
By design, the A380s fly-by-wire controls will make it handle just like any other Airbus, even if it doesn't want to. "We will fine tune it, of course, but I do not expect to discover any characteristics we will not find in the simulator."
Surprisingly, Airbus might even have to degrade its performance to make it safer. "The A380 must have conventional behavior," Rosay explained. So if it doesn't display a little sideslip or bank angle when it loses an engine, those characteristics must be programmed in to the extent that the flight crew is aware they just had an engine failure.
All in all he expects the A380 to show nothing new, and to be easier to flight-test than the A340-600, the world's longest airliner. "It should easier to tune; the A340-600 was so stretched it posed its own challenges," he said. Airbus is here at the show in Hall 4, Stand A14 and Chalet D5-9.
