Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Under what it terms a “fast-paced development program from launch to first delivery,” Airbus has embarked on a 1,100-flight-hour test campaign aimed at achieving EASA and FAA type certification for the A330-900, the first variant of its re-engined A330neo (for new engine option), around mid-2018. The A330neo twin-aisle twinjet is powered exclusively with Rolls-Royce Trent 7000 turbofan engines.

 


An additional 300 flight-hours will be invested in obtaining airworthiness approval for the smaller A330-800 variant. The European manufacturer said that flight testing will be performed in an airline-like operating environment intended to ensure "maximum aircraft maturity and reliability at entry into service [EIS]" with A330-900 launch operator TAP Portugal. "This phase will also define the mature aircraft documentation to be available at EIS."

 


In the hands of experimental test pilots Thierry Bourges and Thomas Wilhelm, and test-flight engineer Alain Pourchet, A330-900 manufacturer's serial number (MSN) 1795—the first of three development aircraft—made a 4-hour 13-minute maiden flight on October 19 at the Airbus Flight and Integration Test Centre in Toulouse, France. Monitoring aircraft systems and performance on board were flight-test engineers Emiliano Requena Esteban and Gert Wunderlich and Airbus head of development flight-testing, Jean-Philippe Cottet.

 


The full flight-test campaign will involve two A330-900s (MSNs 1795 and 1813, the latter expected to fly shortly) and an A330-800 (MSN 1888), each equipped with a medium-level flight-test instrument fit. They will be complemented by first-production A330-900 MSN 1819 with a lighter flight-test instrumentation setup. This third machine will validate the A330neo passenger cabin, which is configured with the manufacturer's Airspace interior, which is designed to accommodate up to 10 more passengers than earlier A330-200 and -300 models.

 


The overall A330neo flight-test campaign involving MSN 1795 (600 flight-hours) and MSN 1813 (500 flight-hours) comprises five phases, with the second machine scheduled to fly midway through the first period. Testing will cover Initial development, development tests, certification tests, EIS preparation and EIS support.

 


Before the A330neo inaugural flight last month, Airbus had already completed some 130 flight-hours of testing with A330-200 MSN 871 between late 2015 and the second quarter of this year. The work involved validation of the A330neo's upgraded flight-control laws, systems de-risking, and initial checks of Airspace cabin components (such as overhead luggage bins).

 


The A330-900's first flight was used to assess handling, check systems and expand the flight envelope at up to 30,000 feet, before checking performance in approach configuration at height before landing. After taking off with flight controls in direct law, a climb to 10,000 feet was followed by an assessment of A330neo handling as the crew began an initial flight-envelope expansion.

 


Further expansion was made as aircraft systems were monitored before the aircraft reached its nominal ceiling. Confirmation of behavior with the aircraft set up in runway-approach mode was followed by the crew conducting a first approach and go-around from 300 feet ahead of a second approach and the A330neo's first landing, again with flight controls in direct law.

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