If the A350F succeeds in giving Airbus its long-sought break in the new-build freighter sector, the airframer might credit – at least in part – unlikely circumstances for its reversal of fortune.
As the wrecking-ball of travel restrictions and quarantines imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic was destroying the passenger transport market, Airbus explored the potential customer demand for a cargo version of its A350 twinjet – and argues that the circumstances enabled it to gather valuable information which might otherwise have remained elusive.
The pandemic demonstrated the critical value of air cargo transport, as freighters kept revenues flowing and supply routes open. But it also highlighted Boeing’s virtual cargo aircraft monopoly.
“One of the things that we were able to do is that we turned the Covid crisis into an opportunity,” says Airbus senior director for freighter marketing Bernard de L’Estoile.
“To collect feedback [we used to] organise big meetings with many customers. And we were putting them in one room, and we were calling that a customer-focused group.”
But such meetings, he believes, left air-freight operators more reluctant than passenger carriers to share strategic commercial details, such as the nature of their cargo, due to the presence of competitors.
“As soon as you bring up stuff, you expose yourself a little bit,” says de L’Estoile. “The Covid crisis was an opportunity for us to collect feedback on an individual basis [and] for operators to give more feedback.”
With this enhanced insight, Airbus shaped the A350F – formally designated the A350-1000F. The airframer hopes the aircraft will re-establish a production freighter presence largely absent since the end of A300-600F manufacture in mid-2007.
Prospects for an A380 freighter were practically stillborn by the time Airbus launched development of an A330-200F in 2007. But the cargo twinjet sold poorly – just 38 aircraft – undermined by bad timing and a lack of focus: it was too large to compete with the nimble Boeing 767-300F and too small to rival the longer-range 777F.
While a conversion market for A330s, as well as older A320-family jets, has since emerged, Airbus is still seeking to offer a new-build freighter.
Its A350F is based on the -1000 passenger aircraft, but with a slight fuselage reduction shortening the jet to 70.42m (230ft) overall. Like the -1000, it will be powered by Rolls-Royce Trent XWB-97 engines.
BALANCED OFFERING
Airbus’s chief engineer for the A350F, Joel Rocker, says the shortening of the fuselage, with five frames removed forward of the wing, is to achieve the “best balance between the volume and the payload”, and to take into account differences in the load distribution between passenger and freighter aircraft.
“On the passenger aircraft, most of the payload is at the rear, where you have the economy class,” Rocker says.
The A350F will have a payload capability of 111t, and the freighter’s most prominent feature will be the large aft-mounted main-deck cargo door.
Rocker says the dimensions of the door have increased from the original design, when it was around the size of that on the 777F, enlarging from a six-frame to seven-frame bed. It will have a width of 4.45m.
“This was a move we decided to do when we were quite confident about the design of the initial door size,” he says. “We wanted to be as good as the competition first, with the possibility to extend.
“And while designing the details, we clearly identified that there was an opportunity to make it larger for a reasonable cost and effort.”
Rocker says the larger door is aimed at easing loading of engines, or long oil-industry pipes, payloads that need to be rotated by 90° on entry. This capability is intended to replace, to an extent, the loss of nose-loading as carriers withdraw older 747 freighters.
“You can turn the engine in one single rotation. So you don’t need to go back and forth because of the door size,” Rocker states. “And there are advantages in terms of clearances, so you have much less risk of damaging the aircraft.”
Rocker says that Airbus was “not in a rush” to launch the freighter, taking its time to obtain customer feedback for a new-generation cargo aircraft, and there have been no major architectural changes since the launch – although numerous smaller detailed design changes, the size of the door included, have been incorporated into the A350F.
“We’ve embedded about 100 enhancements – because, while designing the aircraft, we discovered either more opportunities or more margin in the design.
“We’ve permanently shared the design with the operators, and particularly the large customers, and they came with additional proposals. And most proposals, we’ve accepted them.”
The A350F is considered by Airbus to be difficult to tail-tip – an occurrence in which a tail-heavy aircraft rears up by pivoting on its main landing-gear during loading or unloading.
TAIL STANCHION
But Airbus is nevertheless offering a tail stanchion to customers. “There is no aircraft that’s impossible to tip,” says Rocker. “It’s all a question of margin.”
He is confident that the A350F is stable, but states that freighters can be vulnerable to a combination of conditions including misloading, adverse winds, or snowfall on the horizontal stabiliser.
“Either you tether the nose landing gear – some operators are doing so – but then you need a tether point on the ground, and not all airports have it. Or you install a tail stanchion.
“There are operators that are systematically putting a tail stanchion on the aircraft. And we are penetrating a new market… so we have to adapt to ground procedures.”
Airbus documentation indicates two initial weight variants for the freighter, both with a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 319t.
The airframer disclosed in 2023 that it would raise the MTOW of the A350-1000 passenger aircraft from 319t to 322t, but this has yet to filter through to the freighter.
“We are cautious in our design,” says Rocker. “When we see that we can have more margin, opportunities in the certification process, we may look at [increasing the MTOW].
“But this is what we’ll start with. This has always been the Airbus policy: to be prudent in the design. We don’t oversell. We sell a weight variant when we can demonstrate it works. And there is no drawback for the customers.”
The aircraft’s fuel capability is the same as the -1000 passenger variant – almost 158,800 litres – but Rocker says this amounts to “over-fuel capacity”. No extended-range option has been proposed and no customer has asked for additional fuel capacity. Operators prioritise payload and the fuel capability far exceeds the quantity required for typical freighter routes, Rocker says, noting: “We have way enough fuel on board.”
There will be a supernumerary cabin located behind the cockpit enabling carriage of up to 11 personnel.
Airbus is finalising the readiness of A350 jigs and tools at Toulouse to handle freighter assembly, with stations being reconfigured and adapted to the aircraft’s size and design features.
Work to modify eight stations began in 2023 and the main changes were completed by October last year.
“The forward part of all our stations – where we want to be freighter-capable – had to be modified, so the main jacks and pick-up points on the stations were changed,” says A350F final assembly line industrial lead Emmanuel Royer.
“We reworked the concrete, the hardware and the software to accommodate and manage the new fuselage length.”
The freighter platform features structures enabling personnel to work around the main cargo door and above the fuselage.
“We had to transform our stations by positioning special jigs and a tower to allow people to access the main-deck cargo door and also permit trolleys into the aircraft through the door,” says Royer.
Airbus has developed specialised platforms for the fuselage- and wing-mating areas, allowing access for installations including the cargo-loading system – which, unlike that for the A330-200F, will be fitted directly to the primary structure.
Two flight-test aircraft are being manufactured for the certification programme, with pre-fabrication work underway in various locations, including Airbus Atlantic in Saint-Nazaire and Airbus Aerostructures in Hamburg. The first aft fuselage cone, built at Getafe, near Madrid, was handed over in March, while the lead wing set is awaiting shipment from Broughton, the UK, to Bremen, Germany for final equipping.
The St Eloi plant is handling manufacture of engine pylons, which will include enhanced optical fibre connections to improve detection of overheating in air pipes and reduce parasitic signals.
Rocker says the structural sections have been completed and they are undergoing fitting of equipment and systems, before being shipped to Toulouse where final assembly of the first airframe will commence in the third quarter of this year.
Forward section structural assembly of the second flight-test aircraft has started, he adds. Final assembly of this airframe will follow a few months after the first.
FINAL ASSEMBLY
Rocker says the first flight-test aircraft will be dedicated primarily to opening the flight envelope, testing the aircraft’s fundamental performance characteristics unrelated to its specific cargo role.
Testing of the cargo capabilities and functions, including ground operations, will be reserved for the second airframe. “It’s also the aircraft that will visit our customers, do the cold [weather] campaign, and so on. This is more about the maturity of the cargo features,” says Rocker.
“The second aircraft can also be a back-up to the first one. If we should encounter any issues, or if we have weather constraints that mean we have to postpone some part of the campaign, we can manage with two aircraft. [If we] have only a single aircraft we are a lot [more] weather-dependent, which we don’t want to be.”
Rocker expects the flight-test campaign to be “relatively short”, probably around 10 months, but it will be “busy” because the certification team will need to find cold-weather sites – it used Iqaluit in Canada for the passenger A350 – as well as locations for crosswind tests.
“So this might extend the campaign a bit,” he says. “But it’s about 500h maximum… it’s something like five times less than the -1000 and 10 times less than the -900.”
Airbus had originally intended service entry this year, before pushing it back to 2026 – and then the second half of 2027 – as the company wrestled with supply-chain issues.
While Airbus is intending to increase monthly A350 production to 12 aircraft in 2028, it has been facing a bottleneck in centre fuselage manufacture, which is performed by Spirit AeroSystems in Kinston, North Carolina.
The situation has been complicated by Boeing’s decision to take over Spirit, forcing Airbus to acquire several aerostructures packages including the A350 fuselage work.
Airbus plans to integrate the Kinston facility into its own operations over the next three years, and invest in unjamming the workflow, enabling a ramp-up in production.
Since securing board approval for the freighter in mid-2021, the airframer has obtained firm orders for 63 aircraft. While the order total for the A330-200F peaked at nearly 80, before falling away, the overall calibre of the A350F’s customer list is notably higher, with Air France-KLM, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines, Turkish Airlines and lessor Air Lease among them.
“We are quite happy about the market reaction,” says de L’Estoile, given that the airframer is a new entrant to the large widebody freighter category.
He considers the 777-8F to be the competing aircraft, “because the timings are comparable”, and says Airbus has gone from zero market share to just over 50% in less than four years.
De L’Estoile adds that orders for the A350F have been steady, while suggesting those for the 777-8F have “not been the same” and are “much more concentrated”.
“We have almost twice the number of customers as our competitor,” he states.
Strategic long-term forecasts indicate that cargo remains a growth industry, he adds, in spite of current disruption – and freighters “tend to stay very long in the fleet”.
“People are ordering the aircraft for growth. And clearly they are ordering as well to replace older-generation aircraft,” he says. Airbus is claiming a 40% lower fuel-burn than the 747 freighter, and up to 20% against the 777F.
De L’Estoile says the easiest aircraft to sell during his two decades in Airbus marketing was the A320neo. He argues that selling the A350 freighter is “kind of the same… you take a 777F and you ‘neo’ it, and you get the A350F”.
“This is what I think about the aircraft,” he says.
“On top of that – because we collected a lot of feedback on the [cargo-loading system], on the door, on the air conditioning that we segregated to avoid bad smells being recirculated into the cockpit – we have improved almost all operational aspects of the reference, which is the 777F.
“So it’s an aircraft which is very easy on the market acceptance side. Very easy.”
