The Princess Royal strapped herself into a pilot’s seat for a simulated flight in Singapore before closely admiring huge Rolls-Royce jet engines.
Loud claps of thunder were heard overhead when Anne toured the Airbus Asia Training Centre and Rolls-Royce Seletar campus on Thursday, on the second day of her visit to mark 60 years of diplomatic relations between the UK and Singapore.
Sat at the controls of an Airbus A350 flight simulator, the princess buckled her seatbelt and laughed during her safety briefing with the captain.
At the same time, her husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence was preparing to experience a flight in a separate simulator suspended in the air in a vast open-plan room.
Both simulators, which had screens inside mimicking a runway through the front windows, soon sprang to life and began to rumble and slowly move through the air.
Beforehand, Anne recalled the last time she went in a flight simulator and she was reassured the A350 would be gentle.
Trade commissioner for the Asia Pacific region Martin Kent was at the entrance to the Airbus facility, which is currently the largest Airbus flight crew training centre in the world and is home to nine full simulators, when the princess arrived.
Anne, who wore a beige buttoned-up jacket and trousers with a striped shirt, was later driven through pouring rain to the nearby Rolls-Royce facility, where she met staff and peered between the large engines’ blades to see them up close.
She leaned down to sign a visitor book which was laid open on a table in front of the Trent XWB engine which powers the Airbus A350 – the plane she had simulated flying about an hour before.
Anne was told the book had been signed by the Prince and Princess of Wales in 2012 when they visited the Seletar campus as part of their tour of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in celebration of the late Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
William and Kate had taken up the offer of testing a multimillion-pound jet engine during their visit to the facility more than 13 years ago.
Anne and Sir Tim received a round of applause from dozens of Rolls-Royce staff before they left the building.
