First flight of the Bombardier CSeries airliner will depend upon establishing the maturity of dozens of aircraft systems close to entering the final phase of integrated testing.
CSeries general manager Rob Dewar said at the AeroMontreal forum that the second half of next year remains the company's official timeline for the first flight of the 110-seat CS100 airliner.
But the precise timing will be driven by when all of the various electrical and mechanical systems have completed development, he added. The company wants to avoid delays in the flight test phase caused by systems that are not mature.
"We are making sure the aircraft systems are all mature before we fly," Dewar said, although the company faces a tight deadline to reach the systems maturity milestone in less than a year.
The various systems, including fly-by-wire, flight controls, hydraulics and avionics, have so far been tested only in separate rigs.
Bombardier plans to link all of the systems together in the completed integrated aircraft system test area (CIASTA), a ground-based testing device known within the programme as "Aircraft Zero".
All 47 systems in the aircraft must be commissioned to begin integrated testing in the CIASTA by the second quarter of next year, Dewar said. Of those, 15 systems are the most critical.
There are three major systems that are "competing" within the CSeries industry team to become the first to be commissioned for testing in the CIASTA, said Dewar. Among the three systems are one electrical, one mechanical and another that Dewar declined to describe.
In addition to the systems, the company also has to start assembling the first flight-test aircraft, which includes a fuselage built by China's Shenyang and stabilisers manufactured by Alenia.
Bombardier has already completed the first phase of fatigue testing on the aluminium-lithium fuselage, which has survived 180,000 cycles of simulated take-off, cruise flight and landings, Dewar said.
The CSeries development team wants to conduct further fatigue tests to determine how the fuselage copes with up to 240,000 cycles, he added. "It's pretty tough to break," Dewar said. "It's lasted longer than we thought."
Bombardier chief Pierre Beaudoin has reaffirmed the late-2013 delivery target for the CSeries, but acknowledged some suppliers are behind schedule.
"We have a lot of partners involved, some of which would be ahead of schedule [and] some of which would be behind schedule, and that's not unusual in such a complex project," he said.
But company officials have not backed away from plans to deliver the first aircraft within two years. "At this point I can assure you that the whole team is driving to deliver [the first aircraft] in 2013," Beaudoin said. "We have the experience to deliver this airplane on time."
Source: Flight International
