A Lufthansa Airbus A380 is expected to make a brief stopover in Malta on Saturday in the course of an extended training flight that will also take the world’s biggest airliner to Warsaw and Istanbul.

The double-decker plane, with a number of trainee first officers on board, is scheduled to touch down at Luqa in the afternoon, spending about an hour and a half on the tarmac before returning to Frankfurt, from where it will start its long training flight. It is expected to park close to the Lufthansa Technik facility.

This will, of course, be the first time that an A380, which flew for the first time in late April 2005 and made the first commercial flight in October 2007, will land at Malta International Airport.

Lufthansa has ordered 15 A380s, holding an option for another five, and deliveries are expected to be completed by 2015. It is set to become the largest operator of the airliner in Europe.

The German airline received its first A380 on May 19, 2010. Seating 526 passengers in Lufthansa’s three-class configuration, the A380 can carry about 60 per cent more passengers than the Boeing 747-400 now in service.

Its size is impressive, standing just over 24 metres high and 72.7 metres long with a wingspan of just under 80 metres.

The aircraft is due to arrive at 3.10 p.m.