Flight-testing a new aircraft design is complex, labour-intensive and expensive – so it is reasonable to ask what is its purpose.
Broadly it has two objectives. The first is to check the aircraft´s behavior, identify design issues that need more work, and develop solutions. The second is to explore the aircraft´s entire range of capabilities and document it for the certification authorities, customers, and all those men and women who will fly it and support it for years to come.
Even though computer-based modelling has made huge advances in the past couple of decades, some aspects of any aircraft will always come as a surprise and some are simply not possible to model. So the flight test programme is always a voyage of discovery and safety has to be paramount in order to minimise the risk to the test pilots and flight test engineers who will take the aircraft to areas of the flight envelope that it is unlikely ever to visit in operational service.
It is increasingly common for military aircraft to undergo simultaneous civil and military certification, as is the case with the A400M. Between them, the five development A400Ms will complete some 3,700 hours of flying by the time of the first customer handover about three years after the start of the flight-test programme. Of that, 2,300 hours are related to the civil certification from EASA and 1,400 to military certification.
In the first year of A400M flight-test, the work has been performed more or less entirely at the twin Airbus flight-test centres at Seville, Spain and Toulouse, France which are among the most sophisticated of their kind in the world. Air-ground telemetry can be provided to both centres simultaneously as well as to other Airbus facilities such as Filton in the UK and Bremen in Germany, and to key suppliers around Europe when required.
A major advantage of the twin-site operation is that poor or unsuitable weather at either location need not bring the flying programme to a halt.
In 2011 the A400M will increasingly travel to other countries to conduct more operationally oriented tests – such as rough-field trials – and to experience specific conditions such as hot, cold or high airfields. You can follow the aircraft on their travels via this website.