While the 787’s flight over to Farnborough featured evaluations of ZA003‘s communications systems, the aircraft’s three days visit to the UK air show was far from a rigorous test environment. The only evaluations that took place on the ground were by the 787’s customers.
As early as Tuesday, ZA002, painted in the colors of the program’s launch customer ANA, will depart Boeing Field for Keflavik, Iceland for the program’s first international test visit.
Because of the airports notoriously high winds and long perpendicular runways, the Icelandic airport is ideal for testing the crosswind handling capabilities of commercial aircraft, and last hosted the 777-200 and -300 during its testing. Keflavik has hosted Airbus as well, when the A380 conducted its own crosswind trials there in 2007.
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This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.