Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Evidently regarding discretion as the better part of valor, Airbus has revised the production schedule for its planned A350 XWB, owing to delayed sub-assemblies under production by partners in Europe and the U.S. Airbus has moved the twin-aisle twinjet’s first-flight date from late 2012 to the first quarter of 2013. 
Schedules now show entry into service (EIS) for the initial A350-900 variant with launch customer Qatar Airways some time in the first half of 2014, rather than during the last two quarters of the preceding year.
Airbus parent EADS confirmed the project’s timetable adjustment within its third-quarter results, which showed a Euro 200 million (about $270 million) charge against the late-running program. Near the top of the A350 agenda stands the need to ensure maturity of the main components and sub-assemblies now under assembly at Toulouse in southwest France, where Airbus hopes to begin assembling the first airframe – the static-test article, dubbed "ES" – early in 2012. 
“Lessons learned from previous programs [will be] applied for the next [final-assembly] phase,” according to Didier Evrard,&nbsp;Airbus executive vice-president and A350 program head.
The manufacturer particularly stresses the importance of monitoring progress among suppliers. “We need to control out-of-sequence work, or we will lose efficiency,” said Evrard. “We cannot allow too much work to travel.”
A new “route to entry into service” released on Thursday shows final assembly now expected to continue well into early 2013.&nbsp;
Noting that the first A350 airframe is now reaching the end of the pre-FAL stage, Evrard acknowledged some delay due to the late availability of certain key composites and detailed parts. “But we can be satisfied with what we see,” he said. “It is our top priority to reach the highest levels of part-readiness before aircraft sections enter final assembly.”
Outstanding sub-assemblies that still haven’t arrived from program partners include composite fuselage skin-panels supplied by Spirit AeroSystems in the U.S. and parts coming from UK provider GKN Aerospace, which holds responsibility for wing spars and fixed wing trailing-edge assemblies. Those items effectively have set the pace for final assembly.
Spirit AeroSystems shipped the first A350 center-fuselage panels for the upper-shell assembly last month, when the supplier acknowledged that it was “work[ing] with Airbus to meet all their requirements and delivery schedules for the pre-final assembly phase.”
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