Airbus Beluga XL

Always loved to watch it flying over the city. My old office in emporio offered some of the best views of beautiful HH.

It's not pressurized

Seems fine to me - what is annoying is an old article where you can't pin down when it was written. This way at least people can see that updating is needed.

I took a brief look and these planes are unpressurized.

This is opposite of the typical cargo planes, which often are older passenger planes or derived types that still have cabin pressurization.

It depends on what you're delivering. For the large airplane parts they are designed for, pressurization isn't needed.

They can't carry much weight. Airplane parts are really light for their size and are basically entirely hollow.

I think it's probably just that if you wanted a general-purpose large-volume cargo aircraft, this isn't what you'd design. They wanted a thing that fit very specific, odd dimensions for a particular aircraft wing, and also didn't need very many of them, so they wanted to graft this all onto an off-the-shelf airframe. It ends up having what's probably an aerodynamically suboptimal shape, but Airbus doesn't care because at their low volumes, taking the hit there is easier than designing a new aircraft from the ground up that they'll only ever need a few of. Elsewhere in the industry, this particular shape probably isn't common, and if it were, there would be demand to design something better.

These kinds of aircraft are built for special missions. This is not the first of it's kind. It reminds me of Super Guppy [1]. They are not very efficient aerodynamically due to the large frontal area. In addition, these are designed to carry oversized but not necessarily heavy loads; for example, the fuselage of another aircraft. So there is no point in mass producing them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Super_Guppy

Slightly off topic, but for those interested in aircraft designed specifically for logistics (esp. Military Materiel), see the Caspian Sea Monster. It was meant to leverage the "Pelican Effect" of flying low over water with a wide wingspan; it was never meant to fly more than a few feet high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Sea_Monster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3mvLR9qb20

Speaking of the Pelican Effect, see the Boeing Pelican (concept only) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Pelican

Their point is to have enormous unpressurised volume ("oversized cargo"), their lifting capacity is not impressive compared to traditional cargo planes, especially for the price: each XL costs 200m (1bn for the entire program) for 50t, an An-224 can lift more than twice the weight for half the price.

However XL has more than twice the cargo volume.

Airbus didn't have to cheat into the same type rating in this case. It is OK to have pilots qualified for this type, as opposed to Boeing being "forced" to grandfathering a different plane (737Max vs. 737NG in terms of aerodynamic handling)

The problem of the 737 was trying to keep to the type rating so crew didn't need re-training and re-certification, especially for airlines which refuse to fly anything but 737s.

This was not a concern here, it's not going to be sold to operators (let alone operators who don't want to retrain crew).

There are only 5 Beluga XL (likewise its predecessor) and it exists solely and exclusively for Airbus to move parts around due to the distributed nature of its production.

Before Airbus built their own cargo aircraft, they used Super Guppies, which is why there is one on display near or in two of Airbus' facilities (Toulouse and Hamburg), despite the Guppy being on a Boeing base. Airbus actually bought the right to build Guppies at the time.

Seems like the production of the 737-MAX is going to be stopped https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HVnhrCM4Pk

This isn't even the first iteration of this airframe. The beluga-shaped Airbuses have been a thing for years.

Once you get over a certain size it's really hard to move things by conventional means, especially if you need your cargo to be protected from the elimates.

Airplanes have a major advantage of not needing to fit through tunnels, under powerlines, or around corners.

This is actually a good question.

The answer is that Airbus is a consortium, a prestige project of the European Union.

One consequence of this, is that parts are manufactured in multiple countries, at a considerable distance from one another, as opposed to the more consolidated approach taken by Boeing.

Therefore, they have a unique need to ship very large and somewhat delicate parts from place to place. The Beluga is a consequence of this.

it wasn't even named as such, until they noticed the similarity

Hamburg-Finkenwerder to Toulouse and back.

I haven't seen the XL in person, yet, but the Beluga is a common sighting over Hamburg.

Mostly between Toulouse, St Nazaire, Hamburg, Bremen, Broughton (Chester), and Getafe (Madrid).

They fly into Toulouse. The A380 parts were moved around by barge but there were problems getting them the final bit by road.

Have seen the older Beluga taking off and landing from Blagnac when I have been there.

You can track it by its flight number AIB45XL or call sign F-WBXL

e.g. here https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/f-wbxl

They are also moved by barge. http://a380.boards.net/thread/824/airbus-on-board-ship

Moving the parts by plane works better because the place where the parts are needed (aka the factory where they are put together) is at an airport, which is where this thing can land and directly offload right into the factory. Barges are tougher because unless there is a waterway directly next to the factory/airport (which isn't the case for Airbus's main factories AFAIK), it can be hard transporting such large pieces via streets between the waterway and the factory.

Parts are also moved by barge, this allows moving them much faster between facilities.

They run around Europe as Airbus has very distributed facilities for political reasons (it's a multinational project and thus has facilities in various countries), though mostly between Hamburg and Toulouse.

From time to time they also get chartered for non-airbus cargo: space program parts (that was a primary use case of its Super Guppy ancestor), copters to air show, relief supplies, and Liberty Leading the People between France and Japan in 1999 (as the painting was too large to fit in a 747).

The shape is just a result of the engineering decisions to reach Airbus's goal: transport fuselages to Toulouse. Those are relatively light, but big, so building a tube-like structure above the main "chassis" of the plane yields to this kind of shape, which we then recognize as a similarity to beluga.

It certainly is not functional. It cannot fly in air. Like penguins, it can only 'fly' using a liquid medium. Hence the nickname. Coming soon to a river near you.

Really? By what measure? The OP wiki page says this:

> With 30% more capacity than the existing Beluga, it will be able to carry two A350 XWB wings instead of one.[5] Its new fuselage is 6.9 m longer and 1.7 metre wider than the Beluga, and it will be able to lift a payload 6 tonnes heavier.

No it's not, it's bigger on every dimension.

That list isn't in order of size.

Those lists are alphabetical, not by size...