First Engine Alliance Powered A380 Takes Off on First Flight

First Engine Alliance Powered A380 Takes Off on First Flight

*Travel News Asia*	*Monday, 28 August 2006*

The first A380 Airbus aircraft powered by Engine Alliance engines took off from Blagnac International Airport in Toulouse, France on its maiden flight on Friday August 25th at 10:00 am (08:00 GMT).

The A380 MSN9 with registration number F-WWEA, is powered by four Engine Alliance GP7200 engines, which have the capability of delivering a thrust up to 81,500 pounds (37 tonnes) each. The aircraft is equipped with heavy flight test instrumentation and ballast to produce a take off weight of 430 tonnes.

Captaining the flight was Guy Magrin, Experimental Test Pilot, flying with Franck Chapman, Experimental Test Pilot. The other crew members were Test Flight Engineer, Bruno Bigand and Flight Test Engineers, Patrick du Ché and Jean-Philippe Cottet.

MSN9 is the fifth and last developmental aircraft to join the fleet of test aircraft. So far with the other four test aircraft, which are powered by Rolls Royce Trent 900 engines, over 1,800 flying hours have been accumulated in over 575 flights.

Six A380 customers have selected the Engine Alliance GP7200 engine for a total of 82 firm aircraft orders. These include: Air France, Emirates Airlines, FedEx, ILFC and Korean Air and UPS.

See other recent news regarding: Travel News Asia, Airbus, A380

Subscribe to our Travel Industry News RSS Feed . To do that in Outlook, right-click the RSS Feeds folder, select Add a New RSS Feed, enter the URL of our RSS Feed which is: https://www.travelnewsasia.com/travelnews.xml and click Add. The feed can also be used to add the headlines to your website or channel via a customisable applet. Have questions? Please read our Travel News FAQ. Thank you.