My recollection is that Bombardier's CRJ-200 & 700 Regionals were also certified to FAR/JAR 25 and took similar hours & duration. Total hours will depend a lot on whether it's also a new engine or there are any "new or unique features" (read if it's new to the Agency be prepared to do a LOT of flying). Basic cert will usually include CAT I but CAT II is often done later as it will take a minimum of 60 approaches (over 20 flight hours). There's a lot of difficult wind conditions to obtain which entails flying to where they are - an additional couple of hours sometimes just for one approach IF the winds are still there.
Actual flight hours may not be so important on the A380. At last year's SFTE conference, Airbus gave a paper that said they were going to have all test data downlinked live from the air vehicle. Next test would be just set up required parameters/on condition/go (or even quicker - on condition/do test 1/test 2/test 3 etc - surprising how often seperate flights are carried out for the same conditions but different systems). The aircraft would be able to fly anywhere within a test area roughly from the South Coast of England down to the Med - subject to ATC constraints of course.
The Type Cert holy grail is a 12 months program from first flight but this is being stretched by software requirements. A good rule of thumb for a (civilian) software update is 3 months and it usually takes a minimum of 3 - 4 updates to get all the bugs out. Again the 380 may be ahead here as it probably reuses a lot of code from previous Airbus models.
Last edited by ICT_SLB; 20th November 2005 at 05:04.