Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Airbus Beluga XL enters service at long last
You might have flown on the Airbus A330, a
medium- to long-range wide-body twin-engine jet airliner made by Airbus. The long-haul
version can fly as long as over 13,000 kilometers and carry as many as over 300
passengers or 70 tons of cargo. There is another version of this popular
aircraft for a different purpose.
Airbus produces body parts and assembles them
in various places in Europe and China. They need to transport huge assembled
parts like engines, wings, and fuselages from those assembling factories to the
final assembling sites. Since Airbus is a manufacturer of airplanes, it is more
convenient, also the only way, to transport those massive body parts by
airplanes. But what sort of cargo plane does the job?
Here, the super-transporter cargo plane Airbus A330-743L
Beluga-XL, nicknamed the flying whale because of the resemblance to the Arctic
mammal. The super-jumbo carrier is 63 meters long, 60 meters wide, and 18.9
meters high, and weighs 127 tones by itself. It can carry payload up to 50
tones and 2,200㎥in size for 4,300 kilometers and
longer with a lesser payload. It is Airbus’s workhorse or work-whale. Indeed, the
cargo plane has cute eyes on its body.
Enjoy seeing the video of this gigantic
work-whale of Airbus.
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