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Aviation History
1987
1987 - 0873.PDF
A320 under test Immediately the A320 lifts clear of Toulouse's runway the pilot flicks it like a fighter, pulling up and left into a steep climbing turn. There is none of the old trick of holding it down to build a speed safety margin; the heart-stopping aspects of the manoeuvre were the obviously low speed and ground proximity as the nose rotates 30° up and the right wingtip swings skyward in a 45° bank. The row of watchers on one of the Airbus flight operations centre's open walkways expel incredulous multilingual blasphemies, then laugh with delight. Pierre Baud, vice-president flight divi sion and senior test pilot, is flying the A320, starting the sortie with the kind of take off which Airbus knows will stun the audiences at Paris. Airbus test pilot Gordon Corps, formerly a flier in the Concorde test programme, describes what Last year the Farnborough display-stopper was Airbus Industrie's test A300 with its simulated fly-by-wire handling. This Paris it is the real thing in the A320. David Learmount reports from Toulouse. this A320 display take off is like to perform: "The first few times I pulled the stick fully back, but then the world dis appeared and I chickened out. I wasn't used to losing visual reference like that". It may look good but it is not going to impress paying passengers. What it is There are two A320s involved in the flight-test programme already intended to display more than aircraft attitude is a mental attitude by the test crews—absolute faith in the A320's flight systems to protect them against what would normally be the results of demand ing too much of the aircraft near the ground. The flight-test programme has logged more than 200hr airborne now, but confidence in the systems to keep the air craft within a defined, safe flight envelope whatever might happen was built up within the first few hours. Another favour able reaction was that of one of the French civil aviation authority (DGAC) certifica tion programme pilots whose precon ceptions about what a fly-by-wire aero plane would feel like to fly turned out to be wrong: "I felt I was flying a nice aeroplane, not a computer," was his reaction. However natural it feels to fly an A320, you are flying a computer, or to be more FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL, 13 June 1987 111
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