It’s among the more curious airplane in the sky, however the Airbus Beluga ST is an important link in the production of Airbus industrial airliners.
Able to swallow fuselages and whole wings of the business’s other airplanes, the Beluga flies parts in between Airbus’ European factories and its last assembly plants in Hamburg, Germany, and Toulouse,France It currently looks like a puffed up termite queen, however this year it’s growing even bigger with the next-generation Beluga XL.
It’s a flying nesting doll: A Beluga ST provides the very first nose area of its replacement airplane, the BelguaXL.
Airbus
Airbus tweeted Thursday that it had actually set up engines on the very first Beluga XL in preparation for its flight this summertime. The brand-new airplane (called after the beluga whale, by the method, and not the kind of sturgeon) is 20 feet longer than the Beluga ST and 3 feet broader. It can accommodate an extra 6 lots in payload.
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On the road with an Airbus A380
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That bigger capacity (53 tons) will let the BelugaXL fit two Airbus A350 wings (the BelugaST can fit just one) for transport from Wales, where they’re built, to Toulouse. It also will carry parts for the Airbus A320 and A330 aircraft families and tall sections for the similarly enormous A380. (Too big to fit in any aircraft, the A380’s fuselage and wings are transported by sea and land.)
Like its predecessor, the BelugaXL’s design is derived from an older aircraft, in this case the A330. The first BelugaXL rolled out of the Toulouse factory in January, but after a BelugaST had flown the nose section to France.
As a pan-European company, Airbus has long depended on big airplanes as shuttles. Before the BelugaST, it used the Aero Spacelines Super Guppy to ferry sections of its first airliner, the A300.
Back in the US, the Boeing Dreamlifter, an enlarged 747, flies parts of the 787 Dreamliner to the company’s final assembly plants in Washington state and Charleston, South Carolina.
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