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One area in which Airbus appears to be mostly satisfied is with the powerplant. This is despite the problems that its sole supplier—Rolls-Royce—has been having with the Trent 900 and 1000 on the A380 and Boeing 787, respectively. Airbus Chief Operating Officer Fabrice Bregier says the testing of the first Trent XWB began only slightly later than scheduled, in June, and two are now running. “Rolls-Royce has demonstrated in sequence the maximum power —86,000 lb. thrust for the -900 and up to 93,000 lb. for the -1000,” he says. Although the engines being tested are the baseline version that will power the A350-900 and the smaller -800, Bregier says that the demonstration of the -1000’s thrust “means Rolls managed to extract this power from -900’s engine, and with additional technology insertion it will manage to deliver the performance on the -1000, which was something that could have been questionable.”
Flight-testing of the Trent XWB is due to begin on Airbus’s A380 development aircraft in mid-2011. Bregier says that with regard to the technical problems suffered on the Trent 900 and 1000, “Rolls-Royce is very clear that the XWB engine will not face the same issues—there are design and software changes.”
Initial A350-900s will have a weight penalty due to conservative margins in the design, and Bregier estimates that the first aircraft is around 2-2.5 tons overweight. However, he expects this can be addressed through block changes after flight-testing and through revision introduced with the later variants.
“During design, you have to take more margins in some areas to be on the safe side. Then the static and flight tests validate the design margins. And with that, plus a third element—the technology insertion which will be applicable largely to the A350-1000—you optimize,” says Bregier. “We are confident that we can deliver a good performance at service entry and an optimized performance around the entry into service of the -800.”