World's biggest airliner completes first flight

The A380, which is designed to carry 555 passengers but has room for more than 800, lumbered down the runway before gathering speed and taking off from Airbus headquarters near Toulouse in southern France. It touched down again almost four hours later.

Thousands of enthusiasts cheered outside the perimeter fence as the plane, carrying just a six-man test crew, pulled away over open countryside toward the Atlantic Ocean.

The A380 is a key weapon in the battle by Airbus, in which European aerospace group EADS has an 80 percent stake, to keep its edge over U.S. plane maker Boeing. Boeing is banking on customers wanting to buy smaller long-range airliners.

"We told you the A380 would fly on this day at 10:30 and it flew right on time," Airbus chief executive Noel Forgeard said.

Airbus said the A380 had made aviation history and set out plans for up to 2,500 hours of test flights to pave the way for the A380 to enter service in the second half of 2006.

Jacques Rosay, one of the test pilots, said: "The speed on takeoff was exactly as we had expected. The weather is wonderful. Everything is absolutely perfect and we are very happy."

It has taken more than a decade and some 12 billion euros ($15.68 billion) to develop the A380. The project has been subsidized by European governments and has yet to prove it can make a profit.

The A380 ended the four-decade reign of Boeing's 747 jumbo as the biggest airliner to have flown. It looks like a 747 with the upper deck stretched all the way to the tail.

French President Jacques Chirac has hailed the project as "an immense European success" and described the new plane as a "cruise ship of the skies." The French cabinet, meeting at the time, burst into applause when Chirac announced the takeoff.

The A380 is 49 feet wider, 13 feet taller, 6.5 feet longer and 118 tons heavier than the 747 jumbo, which helped change the airline business.

The length of eight London buses, it has enough room on its wings to park 70 cars.

Airbus has a combined 154 orders and commitments from 15 customers and Forgeard said he expected more orders this year, although not in the next few days. He gave no details.

The plane has a list price of $285 million. Airbus says it needs to sell 250 of the A380 planes to break even although some analysts put the figure as high as 700.

The development cost to shareholders EADS and British defense firm BAE Systems, which has a 20 percent stake in Airbus, includes 1.45 billion euros of cost overruns linked in part to efforts to keep the A380's weight down.

Boeing has vowed to end the dominance of Airbus, which has outsold the Chicago-based plane maker in every year since 2001, and the two rivals are locked in a struggle in which each accuses the other of having unfair subsidies.

Boeing has been focusing on a much smaller money-saver in the 787 Dreamliner, which is due in 2008, and has won two big deals in the past few days.

Air India approved the purchase of up to 50 long-range Boeing aircraft--including 27 of the new 787 long-range jets--at a cost of about 300 billion rupees ($6.9 billion) on Tuesday in a deal that is subject to Indian government approval.

That followed a $6 billion order for 32 wide-bodied Boeing jets from Air Canada on Monday.