Seville, Spain, 5 September 2016 \u2014 The first Airbus A400M airlifter ordered by the Spanish Air Force has made its maiden flight, marking a key milestone towards its delivery. The aircraft, known as MSN044, took off from Seville-San Pablo airport where the A400M Final Assembly Line is located at 15:25 local time (GMT+1) on 5 September and landed back on site 3 hours and 45 minutes later.<\/p>\n
Test-Pilot Nacho Lombo (a former Spanish Air Force fighter pilot), who captained the flight, said after landing: \u201cAs always, the aircraft was a pleasure to fly. I am confident that its unique combination of strategic and tactical capabilities will have a transformational effect on the Spanish Air Force\u2019s air mobility operations as it has done in other countries already.\u201d The aircraft is scheduled to be delivered in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n
As the summer of 2016 is coming to a close, no less than six air arms are now flying the A400M: France, UK, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia and Spain. The operational career of this aircraft is still young and it makes sense to believe that the next decade will see the A400M achieving maturity on a market where it will be the dominant propeller-driven tactical and strategic airlifter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seville, Spain, 5 September 2016 \u2014 The first Airbus A400M airlifter ordered by the Spanish Air Force has made its maiden flight, marking a key milestone towards its delivery. The aircraft, known as MSN044, took off from Seville-San Pablo airport where the A400M Final Assembly Line is located at 15:25 local time (GMT+1) on 5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[66,67,188,189],"class_list":["post-2973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-defense","tag-a400m","tag-airbus","tag-spanish","tag-spain"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2973"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2976,"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973\/revisions\/2976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinaero.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}