Why Test Pilots Get The Big Euros

These pictures, copyright Airbus France, show one of the more hairy-looking performance flight tests carried out on the new King of Airliners, the Airbus 380.

The world's largest passenger jet, like any aircraft, needs a flight manual. The engineers at the European company have the performance pretty well pegged, they think. Between wind tunnel studies and computer simulations, they're confident that they know how the big bird'll fly.

But it falls to Airbus Industrie's experimental test pilots and flight test engineers to validate their data. The tests you see here are, in their native French, "Vitesse Minimum Unstick," which as an example of the French language has to have the Academie Francaise at the end of their liberte, egalite and fraternite.

You can render it in English as "Velocity Minimum Unstick" and preserve the VMU acronym, or put it in sensible word order as "Minimum Unstick Velocity." What the pilots are doing here is trying to get the beast off the runway as slowly as possible -- at various weights and all sensible (and maybe some not so sensible) flap and slat settings.

Because this requires a rotation that the A380 should never see in line service, a special tailskid is fitted for the tests. After all, if you bend the prototype, testing is over until they rivet another one together. In a couple of the pictures, the tailskid can be seen throwing a shower of sparks. Better the sacrificial tailskid than the tailcone of the busy prototype.

The French did not invent the aeroplane -- nonsense about Clement Ader notwithstanding -- but they played an important role from the very start, to the point that aviation vocabulary today is still laden with French words like fuselage, chandelle, aileron. From the A380 through Dassault Falcon Jets and Socata TBM 700s, down to Air Creation trikes, France still builds stylish and world-class flying machines.

You can think about Guy Nungesser, Alberto Santos-Dumont (certainly French in his heart, if not by birth) and Antoine de Saint-Exupery when you look at the A380, because as big as it is, it's just your basic airplane. There are no revolutionary concepts, no Burt Rutan outside the box thinking. Just a plane that needs a heck of a big box.

Just a plane? Sure. Look at it. It has a rudder like the Cherokee most everybody has flown, an elevator like a 172, ailerons, flaps, trim tabs. Sure, it has slats and spoilers like most airliners today, but it's basically got a fuselage, two wings, and a totally conventional tail.

The miracle of the A380 is not the Rutan bolt-from-the-blue concept that it doesn't have, but the extreme feat of engineering that it represents. Indeed, it is in its entirety an assembly of individually prodigious detail engineering feats. Airbus has left no stone unturned in design, in processes, in materials (it is the first civil aircraft extensively to use lithium alloys, which are lighter than magnesium).

To see it fly (as with any jet in this size class, like the C-5 or An-226) is to misjudge its distance from you and to misjudge its speed -- it looks so slow! Well, in these pictures it actually IS slow -- as slow as they can safely fly it.

Before the machine can enter line service, test pilots will have taken it to every corner of its performance envelope. That way if there are any surprises, they happen on a fully instrumented test plane and not to a line crew with a ship full of trusting passengers.

FMI: www.airbus.com