Airbus flew the A350F freighter for the first time on September 29, 2026, five years after the manufacturer first unveiled the large widebody freighter concept and with 115 firm orders now on its books.

The prototype, MSN700, departed Toulouse Blagnac Airport at 10:30 local time for a planned four-hour sortie, with a livestreamed landing scheduled for around 13:30. A Dassault Falcon chase aircraft accompanied the freighter throughout the flight.

Five crew members were on board: two pilots, one test flight engineer and two flight test engineers. During the flight, the A350F operates as a "flying laboratory, tracking thousands of real-time parameters including aerodynamics, structural loads, and sensor data," according to Airbus.

The aircraft wore a parcel-inspired livery chosen through a 2022 public competition that drew more than 4,000 entries. Airbus selected two winning designs and merged them into a single scheme through its corporate design department. Sections of the aircraft were built across facilities in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and France — what Airbus calls a "global endeavor."

A hybrid fuselage drives the test burden

The first flight followed an extensive ground campaign that included high-speed rejected takeoff tests, while test crews rehearsed the sortie through "Virtual First Flights" in development simulators.

Laurent Bussiere, Lead Flight Test Engineer for the A350F program, said the aircraft's unusual configuration demands a full certification effort despite its roots in the A350-1000.

"The A350F presents unique dimensions due to the freighter's specific fuselage configuration – which is equivalent to an A350-900 forward fuselage [length] mated to an A350-1000 rear fuselage [length] and A350-1000 wings," Bussiere said. "In turn, this creates a new aerodynamic model which affects flight control, while the new geometry for the landing gear affects ground maneuvering."

He added: "It's not an A350-1000 and it's not an A350-900, but rather it's between both. So, we need to look at the behavior of the whole system with this unique model. That's why we go into the development simulator to prepare for the first flight and the subsequent 400 flight-hour flight test campaign."

That hybrid geometry — a shortened forward fuselage married to the longer -1000 rear section and wing — is the direct consequence of the main deck cargo door and fuselage restructuring required for freighter operations. It means Airbus cannot simply cross-credit handling and performance data from either passenger variant, and the certification campaign must validate flight control laws, ground handling characteristics and structural loads on a genuinely new aerodynamic model.

115 orders to defend

The order book provides the commercial backdrop to the flight test effort. Airbus has secured 115 firm orders for the A350F since the program was launched, positioning the aircraft as the European manufacturer's answer to the Boeing 777F family in the large freighter segment. Each flight test hour accumulated from Toulouse moves the program closer to converting that backlog into deliveries, and the roughly 400-hour campaign ahead will determine how quickly certification — and revenue service with the launch operators — can follow.

The audience for the first flight reflected the program's commercial weight. Airbus executives and staff, members of the public and media representatives watched the departure live at Toulouse, while thousands more followed the manufacturer's social media broadcast.

With MSN700 now airborne, attention shifts to the pace of the test campaign: whether the 400 flight-hour program stays on schedule will set the timeline for certification and the first customer deliveries against a backlog that now exceeds a hundred aircraft.