Chancellor Gordon Brown will officially welcome the world's biggest passenger airliner when it flies into Britain for the first time this week.
Mr Brown will be at Heathrow airport when the giant 555-seater Airbus A380 - which uses components built in the West Midlands - touches down on Thursday.
Equivalent to eight storeys high and 235ft long, the huge double-decker aircraft is due to go into passenger service at the end of this year.
On Thursday, Mr Brown will officially open the £105 million new Pier 6 at Terminal 3 at Heathrow, which is part of the £450 million-worth of improvements made by airport operator BAA to accommodate the A380 and other future giant planes at the west London airport.
With Mr Brown will be representatives of airlines who have already ordered the A380. These include Sir Richard Branson's airline Virgin Atlantic and Singapore Airlines which will be the first carrier to put the plane into passenger service.
Flying in from the Berlin Air Show, the A380 will be taking a detour so it can fly over Airbus UK factories in Broughton in North Wales and Filton, Bristol.
Airbus UK makes the wings for the A380 and for all Airbus planes.
BAA work to make Heathrow A380-adaptable has included runway lengthening. Both Terminal 3 and the new Terminal 5, which is due to open in March 2008, will be able to take the A380.
The A380 will remain at Heathrow until early on Friday morning while a series of tests will be carried out to ensure that the airport and the plane are compatible.
BAA predicts that by 2020, around one in ten planes arriving at Heathrow each day will be an A380.
Not all are thrilled by this news. John Stewart, chairman of Heathrow campaign group Hacan ClearSkies, said today: "Even if the A380 turns out to be a little quieter than the jumbos currently using Heathrow, by no stretch of the imagination will it be a quiet plane.
"It will be one of the noisiest beasts in the sky. But this trial run won't really tell us too much about the noise levels as the plane will not have passengers on board."
