XL Airways Germany Flight 888T: An Airbus A320 performing a flight test crashes near the French commune of Canet-en-Roussillon, killing all seven people on board.

XL Airways Germany Flight 888T (GXL888T) was an acceptance flight for an Airbus A320 on 27 November 2008. The aircraft crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, 7 km off Canet-en-Roussillon on the French coast, close to the Spanish border, killing all seven people on board. The subsequent investigation attributed the accident to incorrect maintenance procedures that allowed water to enter and freeze in the angle-of-attack sensors during flight, rendering them inoperative, combined with the crew's attempt to perform a test at a dangerously low altitude.

The Airbus A320 family is a series of narrow-body airliners developed and produced by Airbus. The A320 was launched in March 1984, first flew on 22 February 1987, and was introduced in April 1988 by Air France. The first member of the family was followed by the stretched A321, the shorter A319, and the shortest variant, the A318 . Final assembly takes place in Toulouse in France; Hamburg in Germany; Tianjin in China since 2009; and Mobile, Alabama, in the United States since April 2016.

Flight testing is a branch of aeronautical engineering that develops technologies and equipment required for in-flight evaluation of behaviour of an aircraft or launch vehicles and reusable spacecraft at the atmospheric phase of flight. Instrumentation systems for flight testing are developed using specialized transducers and data acquisition systems. Data is sampled during the flight of an aircraft, or atmospheric testing of spacecraft. This data is validated for accuracy and analyzed to further modify the vehicle design during development, or to validate the design of the vehicle.

A commune is a level of administrative division in the French Republic. French communes are analogous to civil townships and incorporated municipalities in Canada and the United States; Gemeinden in Germany; comuni in Italy; municipios in Spain; or civil parishes in the United Kingdom. Communes are based on historical geographic communities or villages and are vested with significant powers to manage the populations and land of the geographic area covered. The communes are the fourth-level administrative divisions of France.