Airbus reports that it has begun production of the new A350 XWB wide-body commercial airplane in Germany. The green light was jointly given at the company’s production plant in Stade by Airbus president and CEO Tom Enders, executive vice president operations and chairman of the board of Management Airbus Germany Gerald Weber, and Parliamentary State Secretary and German government aerospace coordinator Peter Hintze.

The first German component, the upper wing shell, measures almost 32m by 6m (105 ft by 19.7 ft) and is the largest integrated component ever to be built by Airbus from carbon fiber composites.

Airbus currently has 528 confirmed orders for the A350 XWB. With an airframe made of 53 percent lightweight carbon fiber composites, the aircraft has enormous fuel-saving potential. Final assembly of the A350-900 is scheduled to start in 2011, with first delivery expected in 2013.

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Boeing forecasts that air carriers in North America will take delivery of about 7,200 new airplanes over the next 20 years at an investment of $700 billion.

New airplane deliveries in Canada and the United States will be driven largely by the need to retire older, less fuel-efficient single-aisle airplanes and regional jets, as airlines replace them with new-generation, more fuel-efficient models. For the Boeing forecast, the North America market consists of the U.S. and Canada. Mexico is included in Boeing’s forecast for Latin America.

“North America is a large, mature market, and we expect passenger traffic for the region to grow at a modest rate of 3.4%,” said Randy Tinseth, vice president of Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “The fast-paced lifestyles in Canada and the U.S. require rapid, frequent and reliable coast-to-coast and interregional transportation. Driven by this demand, nearly three-quarters of the new deliveries over the next 20 years will be single-aisle airplanes.”

Taking retirement of airplanes into account, the North America fleet will grow from 6,590 airplanes today to about 9,000 airplanes by 2029.

The new Dreamliner, Boeing 787, landed at Keflavík International Airport on September 1st in the  morning for test flights in side wind. According to the airport’s information officer Fridthór Eydal, the airplane will be in Iceland for test flights for about a week.

Keflavík Airport is known for strong winds. Runways extend in all directions, so it is possible to conduct test landings in side wind no matter which direction the wind blows, Morgunbladid reports.

The flight to Iceland was the Dreamliner’s first real test flight outside the US. In December a Dreamliner airplane was supposed to be tested in Iceland in side winds but it wasn’t windy enough and so testing took place in Roswell, New Mexico.

Both Boeing and Airbus have used Keflavík Airport for testing before, including Boeing 777 and Airbus A380.

Airbus A380 Testing

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Boeing has delayed the delivery of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner once more.  Boeing  said today that it now expects delivery of the first 787 in the middle of the first quarter 2011.

The delivery date revision follows an assessment of the availability of an engine needed for the final phases of flight test this fall.

While Boeing works closely with Rolls-Royce to expedite engine availability, flight testing across the test fleet continues as planned.

Boeing said last month that the cumulative impact of a series of issues, including supplier workmanship issues related to the horizontal stabilizer and instrumentation delays, could push first delivery of the 787 a few weeks into 2011. The delay in engine availability has extended that estimate to mid-first quarter 2011.

Bernstein Research forecast that A350 deliveries will slip into 2014 and that Airbus will deliver only eight of the next-generation aircraft that year, flagging a significant slippage in the program.

Asked to comment, an Airbus spokesperson told ATW, “We don’t have any basis to confirm the data in the Bernstein report.” Airbus has reassured the market in the past that the program is on track for a 2013 first delivery.

The New York-based research group predicted only two months ago that Airbus would be able to deliver four A350s in 2013 and 18 in 2014. Airbus plans to deliver the first A350-900 in 2013 and the A350-800 in 2014.

In the same report, Bernstein’s modeling shows twin-aisle aircraft making up more than 50% of Boeing’s deliveries from 2014, with the company regaining the mantle of top commercial aircraft supplier in 2011 and retaining it through 2014. That surge in twin-aisle deliveries reflects Boeing finally getting a handle on the 787 program with 107 Dreamliners to be delivered in 2014, Bernstein said.

The report is based on the latest figures released by Airbus and Boeing. Analysis from Bernstein shows that A320 family aircraft will continue to have the highest build rate at 440 a year from 2012 onward, up from 386 this year. Boeing’s 737NG series is a close second at 404 per year by 2012.

The highest production rate twin-aisle in 2014 will be the 787, Bernstein forecast. A330s will be built at a rate of 90 per year and the 777 at 81 annually, the report said. In the super-heavyweight class, Bernstein sees the A380 reaching a rate of 27 a year in 2012 and continuing at that level through 2014. It sees Boeing delivering 35 747-8s next year, then settling back to a rate of 24 a year.

Citing “a couple of workmanship issues, and a design issue or two,” Boeing CEO Jim McNerney planted another seed of doubt about the company’s chances of delivering the first 747-8 before year-end. In fact, McNerney said the 787 Dreamliner-from which Boeing has already exhausted most of its schedule margin for delivery this year-stood a better chance of meeting its 2010 delivery goal than did the 747-8.

“I would characterize both as normal flight-test programs in the sense that there’s no major reconfiguration that’s been driven by discoveries as we’ve gone through them,” said McNerney during the company’s second-quarter earnings call. “With that said, I think the extent to which there’s some risk to the schedule on the 787, I would characterize that as more [about] getting through lower-risk certification [tasks]-turn-times on telemetry, certification documentation. If you forced me to compare it, I’d say there’s a little more risk on the 747-8.”

McNerney referred, he acknowledged the need for design changes, such as the “aerodynamic tweaks” to the main landing gear doors to address buffeting created by a 30-deg flap setting on landing.

German airline Lufthansa said pilots on an Airbus A380 flying from Tokyo to Frankfurt shut down one of the aircraft’s

four engines as it neared its destination.

Flight crew detected a change in oil pressure which was probably the result of dirt particles clogging a filter in the hydraulic circulation system, Lufthansa said. The engine was exchanged and the plane resumed service to the Japanese capital.

“It wasn’t necessary to shut down the engine, but once in a while pilots do this just to be careful,” Lufthansa spokesman Michael Lamberty said today by telephone. “Thankfully it happened just before landing. In another phase of the flight they may have been forced to perform an emergency landing.”

An A380 operated by Singapore Airlines last year returned to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport 2 1/2 hours into an Asian flight following an unspecified engine malfunction. Air France, Qantas and Dubai-based Emirates have also delayed, cancelled or turned around A380 flights because of glitches with the fuel system.

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Concerned about potentially hazardous takeoff problems affecting the Boeing 747-400, U.S. air-safety regulators have proposed mandatory fixes to ensure the jumbo jets will climb properly.

The FAA is acting after flaps on a 747-400 with Rolls Royce engines automatically retracted during takeoff, it said in an Aug. 5 Federal Register notice. A faulty signal from the engine’s control unit led to the retraction, which can impair a plane’s ability to take off, the agency said.

The proposed order would cover 98 U.S. aircraft and cost airlines about $85 per plane, the agency said in the notice. Boeing on Jan. 12 recommended modifying the 747-400 aircraft with engines made by  GE. and  Pratt & Whitney, which use the same signal design as the Rolls-Royce models, the FAA said.

The agency said the unsafe condition may result in “reduced climb performance” and cause a “collision with terrain and obstacles or forced landing of the airplane.”

The modification, described as not a “significant regulatory action,” will cost about $8,330 for the industry, the agency said.

The first delivery of Boeing’s new 787 jetliner may slip into early 2011 because of inspections and instrument changes on the flight test aircraft, the head of the program said Thursday.

Scott Fancher, general manager of the program for Boeing Commercial Airliners, told reporters in a teleconference that Boeing still intends to deliver its first 787 to Japan’s ANA by the end of the year. He said that “as a cautionary note,” Boeing is warning that the delivery might be extended a few weeks into 2011.

If so, it would be another in a long series of delays on the 787 program, many due to problems with components built by suppliers around the globe that ship huge sections of the plane to be assembled at Boeing’s Everett, Washington, plant. Boeing, which has orders for 863 of the twin-aisle jets, originally planned to deliver the first 787 in 2008.

Boeing’s fifth flight-test  787 Dreamliner and  the first with GEnx-1B engines  took off on its first flight from Everett’s Paine Field at 2:40 p.m. on June 16th.

Currently despite the 787 Dreamliner delays, the engines are not yet quite at its fuel-burn specifications.   The engines are currently about 2% off specifications.

A planned improvement package next year will bring the engines very close to specs and then we have a second package coming on (in 2012) and we will bring the engines above speck.