Airbus A330neo on maiden flight over Toulouse

Airbus on Thursday staged the delayed maiden flight of its A330neo jetliner, an upgraded version of its profitable A330 series designed to buttress European sales against the latest model of rival Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.

The wide-bodied, longdistance jet took off from the aircraft maker’s Toulouse headquarters under overcast skies, watched by top executives from Airbus and Rolls-Royce, which supplies the engines.

In service since the 1990s, the A330 family is Airbus’s biggest-selling wide-body jet, but the arrival of the composite-body Dreamliner has eroded that position.

Airbus hopes the A330neo’s refreshed design with new engines will help it defend its position in the lucrative 250300-seat market, as a second honeymoon in the market and a burst of orders after production delays at Boeing peter out.

Chief operating officer Fabrice Bregier said Airbus had decided to improve the jet’s maximum take-off weight by around 4% to 251 tonnes so that the A330neo can serve longer routes such as Kuala Lumpur to London from 2020.

Separately, Bregier said Airbus still expected to deliver about 200 of the smaller A320neo in 2017, but added that meeting this previously stated target would be tough.

Pratt & Whitney, whose industrial problems have delayed deliveries of Airbus jets, was testing redesigned parts for its engines and expected to start delivering the modified version at the end of this year, he said.

That suggests Airbus hopes to end an 18-month crisis over Pratt & Whitney engine delays some time in 2018.

For now, undelivered jets continue to crowd the tarmac in Toulouse as Pratt & Whitney diverts engines from the production line to a pool of spares to supply airlines that are having to take engines out of service for early maintenance. Most of the delayed jets are destined for airlines that have selected its new Geared Turbofan engine.

CFM International, coowned by General Electric and Safran, is also supplying engines for the A320neo.

The A330neo’s debut flight was also delayed by late completion of Trent 7000 engines from Rolls-Royce, which has been juggling demand with two other development projects. Rolls-Royce says the bigger new engines are 10% more efficient and half as noisy as before.

Airbus said the A330neo would enter service in the middle of 2018.

Meanwhile, Airbus is now touting Canada as its “fifth home nation” after Britain, France, Germany and Spain.