Natural Ice campaign will also test another crítical behaviour of the A350 XWB

Natural Icing trials main objectives are to assess wing anti-ice behaviour and to check aircraft behaviour with natural ice (mainly in the empennage).

There are planned around 5 flights and other complementary tests with wing anti-ice inactive. And Airbus will compare the natural ice accreted with artificial ice shapes that were tested in December, in order to confirm that are far less critical.

With the complementary tests to be done with wing anti-ice inactive, the objective is to compare the Handling Qualities issues, if appear.

But when the flight crew looks for natural ice conditions, they would find thunderstorms. Side results in the Natural Ice tests of A380 done in May/2006 were that more than 100 lightning strikes were assessed in one flight, with no issues declared. So a real lightning strike test with the MSN1 is expected during Natural Ice Test campaign.