The Airbus A380, the world's biggest passenger jet, is to undergo tests which will reveal if its huge bulk is in danger of sucking roof tiles from houses it flies over.

The plane delighted its developers last week with a perfect maiden flight, impressing cheering onlookers with its quietness. However, invisible to the crowds was the disturbance in the air created behind the plane.

The wake from planes can cause mini-tornadoes - known as 'wake vortices' - strong enough to suck the tiles from roofs. Conventional wisdom is that the the larger and heavier the plane, the greater the strength of the vortices it creates.

The A380 has a maximum take-off weight of 560 tons - almost 150 tons more than a Boeing 747. Such is its size that it will be the first plane forced to take tests to assess its wake-vortex characteristics before it enters service.

'Everyone is concerned that the wake vortices from the A380 might be significantly worse,' said Nick Bishop, an engineer who worked on the planes' engines. 'But it is a new generation of aircraft and therefore more efficient, so the vortices may be no bigger despite its size.'

The problem is far from a theoretical one. Thousands of houses around Heathrow Airport have had their roofs damaged by the phenomenon. BAA has spent over £13 million repairing and strengthening them.

Beyond Heathrow, the issue is little known in Britain, but in Germany, residents of Neuenfelde, a village near the runway of Airbus's Hamburg plant, are running a vociferous campaign against the A380. They fear it will damage the village's 17th-century church.

'We've already had a case with an Airbus freighter where a parasol in someone's garden was lifted up and thrown down 20 metres away,' said Karl-Bernhardin Kropf, the church organist. 'We expect damage from the beginning of A380 operations.'

Airbus insists that its unprecedented new design means the A380 will create no more wake disturbance than a 747. The company has measured the wake using computer simulation and is confident it will pass the real-world assessments.

Roof tiles apart, a far more important consideration is the effect on planes landing behind. Wake vortices can throw following planes off course, so minimum distances have to be imposed between planes queuing up to land. If the A380 was found to cause larger wake vortices, a bigger separation would have to be imposed, reducing the number of planes that could land each hour and wiping out some advantages of having a larger-capacity plane.