Largest Airbus A350 takes off — and proves twin-jets are still in the game

toulouse/london — The biggest version of Airbus Group’s A350 wide-body jet made its first flight one Thursday, swelling the twinengine model’s capacity and casting further doubt on the future of four-turbine planes including the Boeing 747 and the European manufacturer’s own A380.

The A350-1000, which departed Airbus’s base in Toulouse, France, at 10:42am local time, seats 366 people in three classes. That’s just 44 fewer than the latest version of the 747, and with a vastly improved fuel burn thanks to the new aircraft’s two engines and composite construction.

So-called twin-jet planes have become the mainstay of inter-continental travel, with the A350, the Bloomberg baseline version of which had its first commercial flight in 2015, following on from the slightly smaller Boeing 787. Both models have built on inroads made by the US company’s 777, which began eating into markets previously restricted to four-jet models fully two decades ago and seats 364 people in three classes with No.1 operator Emirates of Dubai.

Before the advent of the socalled “big twin” aircraft, older two-engine wide-bodies such as the 767 and A330 were limited to medium-haul markets such as the north Atlantic, partly because of practical limits on how far they could fly in the event of one turbine failing. The 777 cast off those shackles by winning certification for flights as far as three hours from the nearest airport.

The standard A350-900 has US Federal Aviation Administration approval for up to five hours or 2,000 nautical miles of diversionary flying on a single engine, making possible trips from Southeast Asia and Australia to the US In a denser configuration the new -1000 will be able to carry 440 people, less than 100 short of the A380 superjumbo’s standard 525-passenger payload, though the double-decker could accommodate as many as 800 seats in a single class. The airline industry’s appetite for bigger twin-engine planes was revealed when Airbus scrapped a shrunken A350-800 variant, which was deemed too small at 280 seats, and opted instead to upgrade the A330 for shorter routes.