EAS experiment on board the Airbus A380

We consider taking the opportunity of about 10,000 hours of test flights of the Airbus A380, and to install in the passenger area detectors for high energy cosmic ray events. The altitude of 10 km (250 g/cm2) presents the opportunity to measure EAS originating from heavy primaries to energies exceeding 107 GeV, and also the proton component beyond the energy of the knee arriving without interaction. At the flight altitude iron originated EAS are well developed and by registering their lateral distribution in the 70 meters long cabin it will be possible to distinguish them from proton originated EAS. The hadron component of EAS (registered as number of secondary hadrons produced in the detector) would help in discrimination and energy estimation. On the other hand, the detection of high energy protons (without EAS) would enable us to measure the high energy proton spectrum. The proton energy would be estimated via hadron multiplicity in single interactions inside the detector. We propose to use about 60 modules of 0.5 m2 of active detectors with scintillators to detect E-M component and a carbon target with lead layer to detect the hadronic component via neutron registrations.