Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Airbus has acknowledged it will require "two or three months" to obtain a realistic understanding of the A320neo's performance, following the <a href="http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/2014-09-25/airbus-a320neo-takes-flight">September 25 first flight</a> of the re-engined single-aisle twinjet. "It's not just measuring cruise and climb performance, but also engine-out behavior [and everything else] and then asking 'What does it all mean?'" commented flight and integration tests senior vice president Fernando Alonso.


The A320neo flight-test fleet will comprise eight aircraft: four A320 variants and pairs of A321 and A319 models, with half of each group powered by Pratt &amp; Whitney PW1100G-JM geared turbofan (GTF) engines and half by CFM International Leap-1A powerplants. Airbus expects to devote some 3,000 flight hours of testing to certification of the planned six variants. The company says flight-testing will be the same for each variant, with "a plan to complete all necessary work, but the bulk will be [accomplished] on the A320, then less on the others."


Results of initial performance analysis should be available by the turn of the year, when Airbus will be preparing to introduce a second A320neo, also P&amp;W GTF-powered, which is expected to fly in January; maiden flight of the CFM Leap-1A-engined variant is set for the middle of next year. The European manufacturer will deliver "probably all" of the A320neo test aircraft, said Alonso, who has now overseen the maiden flights of the past five Airbus projects: A320neo, A350, A318, A380 and the A400M military transport; by tradition, Airbus might retain the initial A320neo (MSN 6101).


With European certification requirements having evolved since the original A320 was developed in the 1980s, Airbus had to agree to the basis for airworthiness approval with the European Aviation Safety Agency and then present its certification plan to show compliance. The manufacturer had learned a lot about the latest requirements through flight-tests of the A380 and A350, according to Alonso. "So we knew the impact of the changes, which can involve systems, aircraft handling&nbsp;and so on, but this might not read across [from one aircraft design to another]," he explained.


One development, for example, has been the requirement to demonstrate aircraft handling in icing conditions. "Previously we had to expose the aircraft to severe icing conditions using [artificial] ice shapes on non-deiced parts and locations,” Alonso added. “Now, we add ice shapes on deiced areas to demonstrate [the effect of] icing when the deicing system has failed. It's all about agreeing with the authorities what we need to do because we are not starting from scratch."


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