Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [70]
The Trent 1000 ultimately made its first flight on the test bed at Waco on June 19, 2007. By this point there were now two 787 engines flying successfully, and all the signs looked good for the successful start of Dreamliner flight tests the following August. However, events were to prove dramatically different.
Chapter 7
DREAMLIFTER
FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS, A FLEET OF CONVERTED BOEING 377 STRATOCRUISERS formed the backbone of Airbus Industrie’s production system. These bizarrely modified transports, known as Super Guppies, droned across Europe’s skies carrying sections of aircraft, connecting the dispersed Airbus partner factories with the principal assembly sites, in Toulouse and Hamburg. The irony of the Super Guppy’s heritage gave rise to one of the oldest jokes in aerospace, namely that every Airbus jetliner began life in the belly of a Boeing.
The saga of the Guppy family, named after a bulbous species of tropical Caribbean fish, started when the second former Pan American World Airways Stratocruiser was bought by California-based Aero Space Lines Corporation for use in transporting large Apollo space rocket subassemblies from factories on the West Coast to Florida. Using a parallel fuselage section from another scrapped Stratocruiser, the transporter was stretched by 16 feet 8 inches. Then the upper fuselage was removed and a new 20-foot-high cargo area was built around a new lightweight roof structure. The outlandish-looking aircraft was christened the Pregnant Guppy, and it was officially designated the 377-PG. The empty weight rose from the standard aircraft’s 78,920 pounds to 91,000 pounds, but payload capability increased to 34,000 pounds.
The Pregnant Guppy was followed by new and weirder variants, dubbed the Super Guppy and the Mini Guppy. The SG was 31 feet longer than the standard 377 and had a new center section that added an extra 15 feet to the wingspan. Unlike the first conversion, which hinged in the rear fuselage, the Super Guppy hinged at the nose and could carry cargo of up to 25 feet 6 inches in diameter for more than 30 feet of its length. The Mini Guppy conversions, on the other hand, hinged simply at the tail. The later modified SP versions of the aircraft also were re-engined, with 4,912-shaft-horsepower Allison 501-D22C turboprops.
Boeing’s extraordinary 747-400LCF concept was first unveiled in late 2003 after two rounds of wind tunnel tests had confirmed the suitability of the baseline concept. As originally conceived, the transport had two large cargo doors in the aft left side, and a “strongback” dorsal fairing for structural reinforcement and improved lateral stability. The difficult door configuration was later dropped in favor of a hinging tail.
In another ironic twist, the Super Guppy was not developed originally for Airbus but was created for the first two U.S. widebody trijet programs, the DC-10 and the L-1011 TriStar. The aircraft entered service in the early 1970s carrying the first few DC-10 fuselage sections up the California coast, from Convair to Douglas’s Long Beach site, and TriStar wings from Avco in Nashville, Tennessee, to Palmdale, California.
But it was most ideal for Airbus Industrie, which desperately needed an efficient outsized freighter to connect its production sites. Seizing on the Super Guppy, it used the original pair of aircraft to shuttle subassemblies such as wings, tails, and fuselage sections between its European partner companies.
The workload eventually grew to the extent that Airbus contracted Aeromaritime of France to convert two more aircraft, for a fleet of four. The last of these was finally retired in 1997, when Airbus introduced a new, purpose-designed, jet-powered A300-600 transporter derivative called the Beluga. In the world of aerospace, one of the most startling ironies will always be that a derivative of Boeing’s last piston-engined product was vital to the birth of Airbus Industries’ first jet, the A300, and to every subsequent member of the Airbus family until 1997.
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