Qantas has scheduled Hong Kong as the first Asian destination with its Boeing 787-9 fleet, with flights to the Special Administrative Region to begin in mid-December. The first 787-9 service to Hong Kong is due to take off on December 13 2018, when the aircraft replaces the Airbus A330 on Qantas’s daily Melbourne-Hong Kong service
The first automatic air-to-air refuelling (A3R) contact between two large aircraft was successfully completed on June 20 by an Airbus A310 MRTT test aircraft and an RAAF KC-30A MRTT off the coast of Spain. Seven successful contacts were made between the two aircraft. The successful development follows a successful test earlier in 2018 where the
Airbus’ BelugaXL over-size transport aircraft has completed its maiden flight as part of its type certification program. The aircraft F-WBXL, took off from Toulouse at about 1030 on Thursday (European time) and was in the air for four hours and 11 minutes, Airbus said in a statement. In the flight deck were Captain Christophe Cail,
Airbus and Boeing have presented their final order numbers after a busy few days at Farnborough, as John Walton reports. As exhausted journalists trooped between the Airbus and Boeing chalets on the final day of the Farnborough Airshow prior to the public flight displays on the weekend, the spectre of the “undisclosed customer” loomed large,
The slowing of commercial aircraft orders on Day Three of the airshow was somewhat understandable after the flurry of announcements from the major airframers over the first two days of the event. However, Airbus and Boeing, among others, were kept busy thanks to the ever-present unidentified customer, as well as deals for after market services,
Rolls-Royce has introduced prototypes of how robotics may be the future of engine maintenance as part of its IntelligentEngine concept. Engineers from the University of Nottingham in the UK and Harvard University in the US outlined a variety of future possibilities, including swarming engine-scanning robots conceived to move like cockroaches through an engine, to a
