Test flying a brand new A320
We left New York for Toulouse on Tuesday evening, 3/7. The redeye to Toulouse was … well it was a redeye. Lufthansa took good care of us, but we arrived in Munich, Germany for our connection pretty tired. However, I perked up when I got off the plane when I saw the Paualaner beer sign. Since it was still beer-drinking hours in the US, I decided that I’d have eggs and beer for breakfast. It was good.
Our flight to Toulouse was fine, although the pilot of the CRJ-100 that we flew was a little hyperactive with the controls on landing approach and rocked us in the back pretty bad. Elizabeth wasn’t feeling all that good when we landed.
Airbus sent a van to take us to our hotel — the Crown Plaza Place Capitole. It was really nice. We crashed and woke up for a really nice French dinner with the rest of the delivery crew — two technicians who would inspect the aircraft and eventually do the closing (on a $45+ million dollar plane) and a captain who was forced to retire because of the FAA’s rule that mandates all airline pilots retire at age 60. (The US is one of 3 countries who use this age, the rest of the world uses 65 as the manditory retirement age…)
We sampled the distinctly Toulouse-ian dish of Cassoulet.
The next day Elizabeth stayed in town and I went to the Airbus factory for a day of ground and flight testing. On the ground we tricked the airplane into thinking it was in the air so that we could verify the proper functioning of all normal and emergency systems. Then we took a test flight.
On taxi-out, we got several glimpses of what will soon be the largest passenger aircraft in the world, the A380.
Here’s another picture of an Airbus being flight-tested: the A340-600, taking off in the rain (through our rainy windshield).
Part of our flight test involved verifying the proper functioning of the aircraft’s fly-by-wire system where a computer interprets all human commands to the aircraft and maneuvers the plane. Here we’re climbing at almost 10,000 feet every minute. For reference, a normal climb on takeoff is about 2500 feet per minute.
We also tested the bank-limiting systems of the fly-by-wire. Here, Captain Earl is rolling into a 67 degree angle of bank. When the aircraft got to that bank, the computer stopped letting us bank further. When Earl released the controls, the airplane rolled back toward a normal angle.
While we were testing the aircraft systems, our technicians were continuing their extremely thorough inspection of the cabin of the aircraft.
After this, we depressurized the cabin, verifying that the oxygen masks automatically drop. Then we descended back for some stalls. Finally, we came back in for an autoland where the computer actually lands the aircraft.
We did that as a touch-and-go where a takeoff is immediately conducted after we touch down. On our climbout we simulated the failure of the electrical systems of the airplane. This caused the RAT (ram air turbine) to automatically deploy to provide emergency electrical power. Here’s the RAT deployed after landing.
Our flight showed that we were receiving another excellent aircraft from Airbus with only a few very minor maintenance items to deal with. By the next time I saw the airplane, they were all fixed and my company was the new owner!
More Toulouse pictures to come!
