First Qantas A380 In Service By October

[Ben O]

http://www.news.com.au/business/stor...-14334,00.html

Qantas A380 in service by October

IT was up, up and away for the flying kangaroo's new super jet yesterday as Qantas Airlines' first Airbus A380 effortlessly climbed into the skies above the French city of Toulouse, en route to an interior fitout in Germany.

The double-decker A380, which has a wingspan almost as large as a football field, will be named Nancy Bird Walton after the sprightly 92-year-old aviatrix.

After an incident-free two-hour flight and a near perfect touchdown at Hamburg on the Elbe River in northern Germany, the latest version of the world's biggest airliner was rolled into a hangar for its cabin fitout.

With the seats, galleys and the entertainment system to be installed, the 560-tonne jetliner next moves into a paint hangar where its appearance will change from bare metal green to the red and white livery of our national carrier.

Two weeks later, A380-01 is scheduled to return to Toulouse, the French headquarters of Airbus, where Qantas pilots and engineers will begin acceptance trials before it leaves for Australia in August. By October it is expected to be flying from Melbourne to Los Angeles.

The jet can carry 850 passengers but Qantas is likely to reconfigure the plane to seat just 500 to give extra space.

Qantas executive general manager John Borghetti, who was in Hamburg with his A380 project team to inspect and approve the interior fitout, said the finished product exceeded expectations.
"And my expectations were pretty high," he said.

Airbus also has given Qantas a rock-solid guarantee it will deliver by December all three of the first batch of 20 A380s that have been ordered.

After that there will be a brief delay of several weeks which could affect the arrival date of the fourth aircraft. The Franco-German company says the review is needed to conduct further tests of the A380 assembly systems.

However engineers at Hamburg said that before beginning the process they wanted to deliver the first wave of aircraft which had suffered a two-year delay due to software problems.