Airbus A330neo stages delayed maiden flight

Airbus Thursday staged the delayed maiden flight of its A330neo jetliner, an upgraded version of its profitable A330 series designed to buttress European sales against the latest model of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The wide-bodied, long-distance jet took off from the planemaker’s Toulouse headquarters under overcast skies, watched by top executives from Airbus and Britain’s Rolls-Royce, which supplies the engines. In service since the 1990s, the A330 family is Airbus’s biggest-selling wide-body jet but the arrival of Boeing’s composite-body Dreamliner has eroded that position. Airbus hopes the A330neo’s refreshed design with new engines will help it defend its position in the lucrative 250-300 seat market, as a second honeymoon in the market and a burst of orders caused by production delays at Boeing start to peter out. COO Fabrice Bregier said Airbus had decided to improve the plane’s maximum take-off weight by around 4% to 251 tonnes so that the A330neo can serve longer routes such as Kuala Lumpur to London from 2020. Separately, Bregier said Airbus still expected to deliver “around 200” of the smaller A320neo aircraft in 2017, but added that meeting this previously stated target would be tough.<br/>