Xtra Impressive?

“Before an airline decides that it needs aeroplanes you need to do some marketing to show your product around,” Airbus senior vice president of sales for the Pacific Isabelle Floret said during the Sydney stopover.

“They have to be willing to buy the product and I believe that when you look at the A350, you should think that it will fit perfectly in the fleet. ” Floret says the A350 has the right range, “mind-blowing economics” and passenger features for airlines in the region.

“It is a perfect fit for the region because we are far away from everywhere here,” Floret said on the aircraft in Sydney.

“It is an aircraft that has got a long range which can reach easily the US, South Africa and of course Asia. ”And least one local airline executive liked what he saw.

“This is a very impressive aircraft,” Virgin Australia chief executive John Borghetti told The Australian after his walkthrough.

“We’ll take our time and make sure we make the right decision, but this is a very impressive aircraft. ” To date the A350 has garnered more than 700 orders from airlines around the globe, including the likes of Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific and AirAsia X (plus a high profile order cancellation from Emirates).

Locally, in the short term at least, Qantas, Virgin Australia and Air New Zealand are perhaps not likely potential customers – the Flying Kangaroo has a stack of Boeing 787 options and purchase rights, Air New Zealand is introducing the 787-9 into service, and Virgin has deferred consideration of further widebody aircraft orders for the time being. Nonetheless, both Qantas and Virgin are Airbus A330 operators, the aircraft the A350 was designed to replace, and Air New Zealand has said it will run a competition between the A350 and 777X when it comes time to replace its 777s (although “that’s many years away” as Air New Zealand chief financial officer Rob McDonald told media in July).

Perhaps with Qantas in mind, Floret said the A350 would also work well alongside the double-decker A380.

“When sometimes you need more than one A380 frequency on a route but you don’t need two A380 frequencies, the A350 is a good sistership for the A380,” she said.

MSN5 was fitted with a fully functional cabin, complete with 42 business class and 223 economy class seats, as well as a full galley and crew rest areas.

It had flown into Sydney from Johannesburg, and from Auckland flew on to Santiago, Chile.

A350 project test pilot Frank Chapman said the flight plans for both these long legs were not restricted by extended operations regulations given they were test flights with only crew and technical staff on board.

The A350 will receive extended operations clearance of 180 minutes upon certification. But Chapman explained Airbus was working on eventually securing 420-minute ETOPS restrictions for operators of the aircraft. This would mean, apart from a few routes over the north and south poles, the A350 would have no restrictions on where it could fly.

A 420-minute ETOPS would mean the aircraft would be approved to fly for seven hours on one engine in the event of an engine failure.

Airbus says A350 certification is scheduled to be awarded before the end of September, with delivery to launch customer Qatar Airways due to follow before the end of the year.