According to the local news, a A330-743L was spotted locally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_BelugaXL
I'd not seen one of these before, but its an interesting design for a transport plane and my immediate thought was to mention it here so Yaz can take a look (although they might already be familiar with them).
(Aug 16, 2023 04:20 PM)stryder Wrote: [ -> ]According to the local news, a A330-743L was spotted locally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_BelugaXL
I'd not seen one of these before, but its a interesting design for a transport plane and my immediate thought was to mention it here so Yaz can take a look (although they might already be familiar with them).
That has to be one of the world's weirdest and most exotic aircraft. I've heard of them and have seem photos, but sadly I've never seen one with my own eyes.
I was more familiar with its predecessor the Super Guppy. (I'm no expert though, just an aviation buff.) I've actually seen a Super Guppy in action at the Santa Barbara airport when I was visiting University of California Santa Barbara long ago. I believe that it might have been transporting rocket stages for launch at the nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base as it was then (now its Vandenberg Space Force Base).
The five Super Guppies were adapted from old 1950's Boeing Stratofreighters for NASA in the 1960's to carry Saturn moon rocket pieces. After they became surplus at NASA, Airbus bought most of them to haul around partially assembled aircraft. NASA has kept one of the Super Guppies, the only one still flying after Airbus retired the ones it was using.
The Airbus company has a unique structure, since it was formed out of aircraft companies in different countries. Each country insists on keeping its own aircraft factory, so Airbus aircraft production is spread out all over Europe with different things being manufactured in different places. To complete an aircraft, all of the pieces have to come together in one place, and some of the pieces (like parts of airliner fuselages) are very big. Hence Airbus' need to have cargo planes large enough to haul very large objects.
As Airbus' old NASA Super Guppies approached retirement, Airbus decided to have their own commercial aircraft division build replacements. So the five very specialized Belugas arrived on the scene, much bigger and better than the Super Guppies. And in keeping with the Super Guppies heritage, the Belugas have been involved with space stuff as well in addition to hauling Airbus aircraft assemblies. Belugas have carried space station modules built in Europe across the Atlantic for launch. (Usually those kind of objects go by ship.)