Nuggets of Airline & Aviation

Chocs-on     Nuggets.....  22 August, 2013

 

 

The Airbus 350 has made its first ‘virtual passenger flight’, with 129 passengers and a cabin crew supplied by Cathay Pacific taking part in a four hour dry run in an A350 mock-up dubbed ‘Cabin Zero’.

 

The make-believe flight is another milestone in the road towards the A350’s debut into commercial service in mid-2014, and follows the next-gen jetliner’s first actual flight on June 14th.

Here’s an inside look at this flight of fancy – Flight 0900 from the Canary Islands to Hamburg, Germany…

On July 25, 129 passengers on Flight 0900 received their boarding passes, walked into the cabin, stashed their trolley bags in the overhead lockers and took their seats for what they hoped would be a comfortable and event-free journey.

The flight took off a little later than scheduled – not so unusual in today’s operating environment – but around four hours later the captain announced over the PA that they had made up time and the aircraft had begun its descent.

All perfectly routine, you might think, until you realised that the aircraft never actually left the ground.

In fact the whole 'flight' took place in a full-scale cabin mock-up in the Airbus plant situated on the outskirts of Hamburg.

This was ‘CVFF’ – the cabin virtual first flight and engineering test staged in the A350 XWB Cabin Integration and Test Centre.

It was the latest stage in the development of this revolutionary new aircraft type, running in parallel with the flight test campaign that has seen the A350 perform 15 flights so far.

 

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