When Airbus' new A380 super jumbo jet takes off on its first test flight this spring, nothing will be left to chance. Every step will be fastidiously documented in the plane's on-board checklist, including the speed.

Once the plane reaches a speed of 648 kilometers per hour over the Atlantic near Bordeaux, France, test pilot Claude Lelaie will accelerate. Then he'll pull back the thrust lever on the world's largest passenger plane. "We'll be checking to see whether it reacts normally," the Frenchman says, "then we'll increase to the maximum speed."

Not a single expert believes the jet will crash on the maiden test flight, but a plan exists for the emergency evacuation of the test pilots and engineers who will be on board. A slide will help the crew swiftly escape through the cargo bay, and the six-member crew and team will already be wearing parachutes at the time of takeoff in order to save time.

On Tuesday, Germany's Gerhard Schroeder, France's Jacques Chirac, Britain's Tony Blair and Spain's Jose Luis Zapatero will all be on hand to celebrate the "roll out," of the A380. When they do, Airbus workers will take only a brief break from their work - they're all under enormous pressure to meet the deadline for the first test flight.

Airbus Chairman Noel Forgeard has self-confidently said that the new king of the air would lift off on its maiden test flight during the first quarter. Insiders believe the flight will be pushed back as far as possible but that a March 31 date could be set to enable the chairman to keep his word with investors. The stakes are tremendous for Airbus -- in total the company will have spent an estimated €13.7 billion to develop the first long-haul aircraft to offer serious competition to Boeing's four-decade-old 747 jumbo jet. The plane is expected to hold 555 passengers on a normal flight, but depending on how it is configured, could hold up to 800. The 747 holds 416 passengers.

When the plane's jet engines slowly lift it off the ground, on board instruments will register over 6,000 measurements on the gigantic aircraft. Video cameras will observe every move of the plane's undercarriage. German engine specialist Manfred Birnfeld will also join the flight to monitor the jet engines.

Meanwhile, millions of potential A380 passengers will be glued to their TV to watch the maiden flight. Airline representatives -- like Lufthansa's Joachim Schneider -- will also be watching. The German airline has already pre-ordered 15 jets and will have to pull together close to €4 billion ($5.22 billion) to pay for them.

Schneider is the head of the A380 team at Lufthansa and at the end of the testing period will say whether he thinks Lufthansa should go through with the sale. In the airline industry, exit clauses are a standard part of contracts and they cover grave deficiencies ranging from overly high jet fuel consumption to delays in delivery.

Will the A380 be reliable or will it spend too much time in the hangar with early glitches? "We're very optimistic," says Schneider. Still, he's cautious enough to also add: "But there are always surprises."

Lufthansa technicians are famously cautious in introducing new planes. When Boeing delivered the world's first jumbo jet, the 747, the long-haul planes spent their first two weeks serving domestic passengers. That way, they would never be too far away from repair hangars. "We're also considering similarly expensive measures for the A380," he says. How the plane behaves during the next few months will help them decide.

Assessing the unthinkable

Experts from reinsurance companies,including Ferdinando Martino of Swiss Re in Zurich, will also be part of the captive audience for the A380's maiden flight. The current coverage limit for planes is €2 billion. But that rate will be increased to €2.5 or 3 billion for the A380 to cover payments for passengers or their families and the damage that a crashing plane filled with up to 310,000 liters of kerosene could cause.

Martino and his staff of mathematicians must now calculate how high to set insurance premiums for policies covering damages of that magnitude. The results of the tests will enable underwriters to obtain a more precise image of the new jumbo's risk factors. "The A380 is unique -- there is no other comparable airplane in the world," he says.

Gordon Woo of Risk Management Solutions in London, says crash potential is one thing to look at. Another is the large number of smaller, largely harmless breakdowns that only turn up in the highly classified records kept by the airlines. Serious cases must be reported to aviation regulatory officials. But "insurance companies and the public can only get access to the data with great difficulty if at all," he says. Thus, most of these incidents remain unknown to the public.

Things thought to be controllable can also go wrong. During the 1970s, engineers had to take responsibility for a freight door that had been poorly secured on the new DC-10 jet. Just after its introduction, a seal burst and though the plane was able to manage a landing, the part had to be replaced on all other aircraft.

In order to avoid such unpleasant surprises, Airbus' engineers are focusing all of their attention on recognizing complications during the testing phase. "They want to have the learning curve, for the most part, under control before the first passenger boards," Woo explains.

The design of the airbus is extremely complex. In a hall in Dresden, 190 hydraulic cylinders are being used to fatigue test a complete A380 model. For two years the jet will be squeezed, stretched and crushed in order to simulate wear accumulated over the 25 years an average jet is expected to fly.

Simultaneously, a second model will be tested in Toulouse, France. The plane will be tested to its breaking point. Hopefully it will be right where aerospace engineers say it will be. Otherwise, it will mean overtime hours.

Even the smallest problems will raise the eyebrows of airlines and insurers -- and any marked deviation between the simulations used during the A380's development and reality could lead the investigators at the aviation regulatory authorities to refuse to certify the plane for take off.

It's not an issue people at Airbus like to discuss. Nevertheless, the Airbus designers know that in coming months they have to be prepared for setbacks -- that's mostly the result of the plane's size. "They're advancing into new physical dimensions," says Horst Baier, an aeronautics professor at Munich's technical university.

Because of the sheer size of the super jumbo, it "wasn't possible -- not even for a single part of the aircraft to fall back on existing aircraft models," says Robert Lafontan, Airbus' chief engineer in Toulouse. Everything had to be designed from the ground up and newly built.

A "hellish" engineering challenge

The plane's enormous wings are a great example. Six single-family homes could comfortably fit inside their 845 square meter surface. "The bigger the wings, the less frequent the vibrations," explains Baier. The vibrations can generate enormous force that can lead to devastating consequences -- and they proved to be one of the more complicated aspects of the plane's development. In order to protect the enormous passenger compartment, the individual structural elements had to be assembled in an incredibly sophisticated manner. "It was hell," an Airbus engineer explains. Test pilot Lelaie will be the first to know whether it all worked.

As a precaution, the A380s builders went for maximum stability when mounting the wings at the plane's fusilage. The wings are 3.5 meters thick at every point where the wings are connected to the fusilage, Baier says. That's almost three times as big as those on the Boeing 747. One of the reasons for the larger size is that "when a part is made twice as big, it quadruples the power," Baier explains.

But the wings could also prove to be a handicap. All jets produce a turbulent wake at take off, but aviation experts fear the vortex created by the A380 could be unlike any seen before in a commercial airliner. Engineers will only be able to accurately measure the power of the wake after the A380 begins making test flights, but calculations suggest it will be enormous.

During a court case in Hamburg over a hotly contested extension of the Airbus runway at the company's plant there, the company was forced to open its books -- something it is never keen to do. The quaint St. Pankratius Church lies in the path of jets taking off and an environmental impact report was called to determine what effect the A380's wake could have on the place of worship. In the report, experts warn that "in the worst case scenario, the jet could create brief hurricane-force winds." The difference from earlier Airbus models, the report said, is that the A380's tail wind will be larger and last longer."

Nor will it just be a burden for the truss of St. Pankratius. The winds could also throw trailing jets into dangerous vortices. The more powerful the vortex, the longer other jets have to taxi before taking off -- a factor that will increase the airport charges companies flying A380s are charged.

Turbulence is another concern. Aerodynamic tricks in the airplane's design help it combat dangerous turbulence. But in order to limit excessive force, the plane had to be reinforced, which resulted in the A380's design getting heavier and heavier. At the end of 2003, internal documents from the development department obtained by DER SPIEGEL showed that the operating weight of an empty A380 was 290 tons -- 14 tons more than originally planned.

Since then, the Airbus people have succeeded in trimming some of the baby fat. "We've gotten the weight down to just five tons over the planned value," says Lufthansa's Schneider. That's largely thanks to the use of light carbon fiber composites for many parts.

"But it's not possible to use any more," says Schneider, slightly disappointed. But only the fuel tanks can tell whether or not the A380 will become the "flying piggybank" some have claimed it will be. The rule of thumb is that a single kilogram of excess weight costs an additional €100 per year -- so five tons would mean about a half-million euros per plane. Airbus has stubbornly insisted that the plane will not use more than 2.9 liters of jet fuel per passenger per 100 kilometers. But aviation experts doubt whether the company can maintain that ratio considering the jet's weight problems.

In its weight watching struggle, the aircraft-maker constantly had to juggle the desire for profitability with the need for safety. And using new composite materials also presents risks. With carbon composites, for example, it can be harder to identify cracks than in metal.

So in areas where the company was in doubt, it erred on the side of safety. Afterall, if an A380 crashes, the technicians don't want to be held responsible. And most experts agree that a crash could drag the whole company down with it.

Pilot and aeronautics researcher John Hansman at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sees the A380 bringing a new "social quality" to the air. The consequences of a big accident, he says, would "have far more significance than you can estimate from the mere number of victims."