Beluga Whale Aircraft - There was one option—the American-built Super Guppy oversize transport, built by Aero Spacelines of California. As I previously wrote, the Super Guppy was an elongated, large-domed airframe that NASA had contracted to transport bulky parts for the Apollo program and other missions from the West Coast to Florida, for final assembly at Cape Canaveral.
Due to the decentralized nature of production, parts for Boeing airframes are shipped across Europe—a time-consuming and expensive process that was historically done by road transport, or rail when possible. Rail and road transport are not ideal—they're slow, and expensive.
Beluga Whale Aircraft
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Airbus needed something big enough to transport their components by air. While you might think the aircraft would run slower, “the drag is about the same,” says George. “What changes really is the behavior of the aircraft at the rear, at the bottom of the cargo bay.
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The Super Guppy airframes were based on 1940s-era passenger airline airframes. By the 1980s they had started showing their age. So, Airbus decided to drop the Guppies in favor of their own design, tailored to Airbus needs.
"The Beluga ST are only at 50% of their life. They have been designed for 30,000 flight cycles and currently have an average of 15,000," said Philippe Sabo, head of Airbus Transport International. A flight cycle is one take-off and landing.
The Beluga's transported one of its most unusual cargo items in 1999. A Beluga flew with Eugène Delacroix's iconic painting Liberty Leading the People, a stylized depiction of the French Revolution. The painting itself was nearly ten feet tall and twelve feet wide, and could not fit inside other commercial airliners, so the Beluga stepped in and flew it from Paris to Tokyo.
The facility has undergone special modifications for the arrival of the Beluga XL, such as creating two sets of doors for the Beluga Line Station – one to fit the Beluga and one to fit the Beluga XL.
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“This is why we have lifted the vertical tail plane by more than two meters to get it out of the flow behind the cargo bay and we also have the special acceleration on the horizontal tail plane to give stability to the aircraft.”
However, the design is functional as well as cute. The enormous cargo bay is large enough to carry two A350 wings at a time (the old Beluga could transport only one), and the whale-like nose improves the craft’s aerodynamic efficiency.
Analysts say demand for outsized positions that can be transported without dismantling them has been rising, partly on the back of weakened supply chains. Logistics managers turn to oversized airplanes when there is no time to use sea lanes.
The A300’s nose and cockpit were lowered slightly to give loading crews straight-in access to the cargo bay, which cut down loading and unloading times. The other advantage to a lowered immovable cockpit is that the Beluga does not have to disconnect electrical and flight systems between loads, which greatly reduces loading and unloading time.
So how does one go about steering a machine like this through the skies? Well, says George, despite the plane’s unusual appearance, “for the pilots this is really an A330. Our pilots will be trained on the A330 and then they will get a Delta qualification to enable them to fly the Beluga XL.”
It is one of the largest cargo planes in the world, with its nose shaped like a Beluga whale. It offers customers with large cargo transport solutions for a variety of sectors, including space, energy, military, aeronautics, maritime and humanitarian sectors.
Airbus cut average output by 40% when the pandemic hit and plans to restore and slightly increase output of single-aisle jets by summer 2023. But wide-body output is expected to remain around half levels foreseen when Beluga XL was launched in 2014.
Airbus also resurfaced the landing strip, erected blast fences (to safely redirect the engines’ high-energy exhaust) and installed new turn pads – necessary for when the Beluga XL turns around on Howarden’s relatively short runway of around 1,600 meters.
PARIS, Jan 25 (Reuters) - Airbus (AIR.PA) plans to charter out its whale-shaped Beluga transport planes -whose main job until now has been to ferry aircraft parts between its plants in Europe - to help other industries haul urgently- needed outsized machinery by air.
General Electric said on Thursday it plans to invest more than $450 million in its existing manufacturing facilities in the United States this year and hire more than 1,700 employees, in a bid to bolster its aerospace and energy businesses.
“This plane is, I would say, iconic for our company,” George tells CNN Travel. “This is the workhorse for Airbus. So it is more than a plane. It is what enables Airbus to build aircraft every day.”
The top of the fuselage was expanded to twenty-five feet in diameter, giving the Beluga its customary puffy look. Loading is done through the top of the expanded section. This section opens upwards, in contrast to the Super Guppies, which pivot outwards on hinges like a door.
The XL’s twinkly-eyed, smiling-faced livery capitalizes on this. The whimsical design was chosen by Airbus staff following a poll in which 20,000 employees were given six options and asked to choose their favorite. With 40% of the vote, it was the clear winner.
Airbus is a truly pan-European corporation, and as such has production facilities in Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom—not to mention the United States, Canada, and China. Final assembly of Airbus airframes generally takes place in various centers in Europe.
Super transporter Airbus Beluga landed at Mumbai's Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) on Tuesday, and instantly grabbed attention of the airport staff and passengers due to its sheer size. Also known as the A300-600ST Super Transporter, the Airbus Beluga offers a unique way to transport oversized air cargo.
According to the Airbus website, these transport planes have been operating for the company's own industrial airlift needs since the mid-1990s, and are progressively being replaced by a fleet of six new-generation BelugaXL versions. Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world's largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day.
Reuters provides business, financial, national and international news to professionals via desktop terminals, the world's media organizations, industry events and directly to consumers. At a time when jumbo passenger airliners such as the Airbus A380 and Boeing 747 are on their way out, the Beluga XL – the first of five – will be one of the biggest beasts in the skies.
You won't be able to travel in it, though. This is a super-transporter cargo plane, designed by Airbus to fly its aircraft components between European production sites and its final assembly lines in Toulouse, Hamburg and Tianjin.
Caleb Larson holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. He lives in Berlin and writes on U.S. and Russian foreign and defense policy, German politics, and culture. This article first appeared earlier this year.
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