Science Pictures

A380 in onera's F1 Windtunnel

A321
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A380 Model
in the Fauga-Mauzac F1 Wind Tunnel near Toulouse (GMT)

April 27, 2005: The A380 Super jumbo makes first flight.

December 19, 2000: the production stage began for the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger plane, which will also have the lowest per-passenger and per-kilometer operating costs for high load capacity aircrafts.

A number of significant technological challenges had to be overcome to create the super-jumbo. Airbus laboratories have worked with laboratories from EADS Group, universities and research centers. Airbus has been working in close cooperation with Onera for more than 20 years.

Onera's teams had begun studies which would contribute to define and design the plane even before the "A3XX" project was launched in August 1994. For the last 10 years, some 340 Onera staff members have been involved in the development of the A380. Onera has also provided its outstanding testing facilities and its most sophisticated modeling and simulation tools, which contributed greatly to the success of the A380 program.

Onera's expertise on the A380 program has included the following fields: