Airbus A350F Freighter Takes Off on Its First Flight, Starting a 400-Hour Race to 2027 Certification
A widebody freighter leaves the ground
Airbus's newest airplane left the runway at Toulouse-Blagnac at 10:30 a.m. local time on September 29 and did not come back for more than four hours. The A350F, the manufacturer's first purpose-built widebody freighter, flew for 4 hours and 11 minutes before touching back down at 2:41 p.m., according to flight-tracking data reported by Simple Flying and AirInsight, both of which followed the sortie in real time. The prototype, registered F-WXLD and carrying manufacturer's serial number 700, climbed to at least 25,000 feet and flew racetrack patterns between Toulouse and Bergerac in southwest France while test crews ran through a card of handling and systems checks.
It is, on paper, a routine first flight — every new commercial jet has one. But this one carries unusual weight for Airbus. The A350F is the company's answer to a cargo market that, for half a century, Boeing has had almost entirely to itself at the top end. The 747 freighter and now the 777F and incoming 777-8F have no direct widebody rival from Toulouse; airlines and integrators wanting a large freighter new off the line have had exactly one supplier to call. The A350F's first flight is the moment that changes, at least on the test-flight calendar — actual deliveries are still more than a year away.
Inside the flight
The crew for the sortie was five-strong: experimental test pilots Sylvain Guiraud and Bernardo Saez-Benito, test flight engineer Ludovic Giraud, and lead flight test engineers Laurent Bussiere and Jaime Angoloti, according to Simple Flying's reporting. The flight followed a milestone completed four days earlier, on September 25, when the same airframe ran a high-speed rejected takeoff test on the ground — accelerating toward decision speed before the crew cut power and stood on the brakes to prove the jet could stop safely in a worst-case abort. That test, along with weeks of lower-speed taxi and brake checks, is the standard pre-flight gate every new Airbus type clears before its wheels leave the ground.
Once airborne, the crew put the aircraft through basic handling qualities checks and systems verification at altitude — the first of what will become hundreds of hours probing the aircraft's flight envelope, structural loads, and the freighter-specific systems that distinguish it from the passenger A350, including the large forward main-deck cargo door and reinforced main-deck floor built to take loaded pallets and containers.
A shorter test campaign, by design
What makes the A350F test program notable is how short Airbus expects it to be. Simple Flying reports the company is targeting roughly 400 flight-test hours to certify the freighter — a fraction of the 1,000-plus hours that a genuinely new airframe would typically need. Airbus's reasoning, relayed in that same reporting, is that the A350F shares the vast majority of its structure, systems, wing and engines with the passenger A350 variants already flying and already certified, so testing can focus narrowly on what is actually new: the cargo door, the main-deck floor and loading systems, and the aircraft's slightly different aerodynamic and weight-and-balance characteristics as a freighter. Airbus has said simulation and data carried over from the passenger A350 program let it demonstrate much of the required compliance without re-flying ground already covered.
Two flight-test aircraft will carry that 400-hour campaign. MSN700 — the jet that flew on September 29 — is assigned primarily to aerodynamics and performance work. A second airframe, MSN701, will focus on systems testing once it joins the program. Airbus and both outlets consistently point to certification and first customer deliveries arriving in 2027.
Who is waiting for it
Airbus has booked 117 firm orders for the A350F, per Simple Flying's figures pulled from the manufacturer's order book. Atlas Air holds the largest single commitment at 20 aircraft. Behind it sits a list that reads like a cross-section of the industry's biggest cargo and combination operators: Air China, Etihad Airways, Starlux Airlines, Air France, CMA CGM, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines and Turkish Airlines, each with orders ranging from two to ten aircraft. Airbus has said the first two production airframes off the line will be built in parallel for CMA CGM Air Cargo and Singapore Airlines, though which of the two actually takes delivery first — the de facto launch customer title — has not been confirmed.
That order list matters because it spans both dedicated freighter operators (Atlas Air, CMA CGM) and passenger airlines that also run freighter divisions (Air France, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines, Turkish Airlines) — a sign that Airbus is selling the A350F not just to cargo specialists but to full-service carriers looking to replace aging 777 and A330 freighters, or MD-11s and 747s, in their own fleets. Etihad and Air China's presence on the list also underlines how much of the freighter replacement cycle Airbus is chasing across the Gulf and Asia, where cargo demand has stayed resilient even as passenger markets have gone through their own post-pandemic resets.
The spread of order sizes is also telling. Atlas Air's 20-aircraft commitment anchors the book, but the bulk of the backlog is made up of smaller orders in the two-to-ten range from carriers that mostly already fly the passenger A350 — Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines, Turkish Airlines — and are, in effect, extending a type they already operate, train crews on, and maintain into a second role on their ramps. That commonality is central to Airbus's pitch: an airline that already flies the A350 passenger jet can add the freighter without building an entirely separate maintenance, training, and spares operation around it, a lower-friction proposition than switching a fleet to an unrelated widebody purely for its cargo hold.
Racing a widened field
The A350F's timing puts it on a collision course with Boeing's cargo roadmap rather than ahead of it. The 777F remains in production and the 777-8F — Boeing's next-generation large freighter, derived from the 777X passenger family — is working through its own development schedule, aimed at entering service later this decade. Airbus is not catching Boeing from a standing start; it is trying to take share in a market segment Boeing has owned uncontested for fifty years, as French outlet Air-Journal noted in its coverage of the flight, framing the A350F's debut explicitly as ending that run.
Where Airbus argues it has an edge is efficiency: the A350F borrows the passenger A350's newer airframe materials and Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engines, which the company has pitched as giving it a meaningful fuel-burn advantage per tonne of cargo carried over 777-generation freighters that trace their basic design back further. Whether that translates into enough of a commercial edge to peel meaningful freighter share away from Boeing over the next decade will depend less on Tuesday's flight than on how the certification campaign goes from here, and on how the 777-8F's own schedule holds up in the meantime.
What comes next
For now, the September 29 flight starts the clock rather than finishing anything. Airbus will fly both MSN700 and MSN701 through the bulk of that roughly 400-hour test card over the coming months, covering structural loads, systems reliability, cold- and hot-weather trials, and the operational cargo-handling checks that no passenger A350 ever had to clear. Certification by regulators in Europe and the United States, followed by first deliveries, is still penciled in for 2027 — meaning the aircraft that flew its first sortie between Toulouse and Bergerac this week won't be hauling freight commercially for at least another year.
That gap is normal for a new type, even one built heavily on an existing design. What Tuesday's flight demonstrated is that the physical aircraft — cargo door, reinforced floor, and all — flies the way Airbus's engineers predicted it would, which is the baseline every subsequent certification milestone depends on.
The next markers to watch are straightforward: MSN701 joining the flight-test fleet to begin the systems-focused half of the campaign, the pace at which the two jets burn through the roughly 400-hour test allotment over the coming winter, and whether Airbus holds to its own forecast that the bulk of that testing can be compressed because so much of the airframe, wing and Trent XWB engines are already proven on the passenger A350. Any slippage in that compressed schedule would narrow Airbus's window to get ahead of Boeing's 777-8F before that program reaches its own service-entry date later in the decade. For now, the only confirmed fact is the one the flight itself established: the A350F flies, and the clock on getting it certified and into the hands of Atlas Air, CMA CGM, Singapore Airlines and the rest of its customers has officially started.
Sources
- Airbus A350F Completes Maiden Test Flight — Simple Flying
- Airbus A350F Completes Successful First Flight — AirInsight