Flight test resources are extremely expensive, so it is no surprise that Boeing has made an effort to tailor their test fleet to get the most out of each airframe. This article not only gives a bit of a status report on the current test program, but contains some very interesting structural and aeroelastic history behind earlier versions of the 747. If you thought that intake ovalization in the early days was the only big problem, take a look at the link below. Once again, the flight controls folks are the cavalry.
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/06/14/357616/boeing-plans-latter-stages-of-747-8-test-programme.html
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