While you might think the aircraft would run slower, “the drag is about the same,” says George. Our pilots will be trained on the A330 and then they will get a Delta qualification to enable them to fly the Beluga XL.”
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. 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.Nature, after all, perfected the beluga whale and, explains Grosse, “flying in the air is a little bit like swimming in the sea.” However, the design is functional as well as cute. The Beluga XL is the successor to the Beluga, or Airbus A300-600ST, which has been in operation since 1995.Its design was adapted from an A330 airliner, with Airbus engineers lowering the flight deck and grafting a huge cargo bay onto the fuselage to create its distinctive shape. Though passengers won’t be able to travel in it, but the Beluga will play a crucial part of the construction of many of the commercial passenger planes we’ll all be flying on over the decades to come.The super-transporter cargo plane is designed by Airbus to fly its aircraft components between production sites in Europe and its final assembly lines in Toulouse, France Hamburg, Germany and Tianjin, China. 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 six – will be one of the biggest beasts in the skies. One of the aviation world’s most hotly anticipated planes, the Airbus Beluga XL, has entered full-time service, having made its first operational flight on January 9, 2020.
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