Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [71]
Shimmering in the California sunshine, NASA’s Super Guppy departs from Edwards AFB after undercarriage replacement in 2005. Betraying Boeing 377 Stratocruiser/KC-97 heritage with its “levitating” shallow climb angle, the Super Guppy became the backbone of the Airbus production system before replacement with the purpose-built Beluga. NASA’s aircraft, the last of four to be used by Airbus, incorporated some original parts from the first Pregnant Guppy, which, in turn, used parts of the prototype Stratocruiser dating from 1948. Loads entered through the nose, which pivots 200 degrees to the left to give access to the 111-foot-long cargo area. NASA
Walt Gillette recalled that the choice to opt for an airborne-based logistics network was “strictly an economics-based decision. Sometimes the world forgets Boeing was contracted to build the Stage 1B of the Saturn rockets for the Apollo program, and KC-97/Stratocruisers were converted to make that happen. It is simply the time value of money, and ocean shipping is getting to be more and more specialized, which makes it harder to find shippers who will take these odd-sized pallets.”
Mike Bair, then 7E7 senior vice president, said the plan would hopefully save the company up to 20 to 40 percent in production costs against current methods. “Transporting large pieces by air will allow us to dramatically reduce flow time,” though he added a note of caution, saying that “this is a tool built for the 7E7, and their fates are clearly linked.” Problems with the new freighter could spell problems for the 7E7, and vice versa. But while the risks were high, so were the rewards. Delivery times for the large subassemblies would be reduced from about thirty days to just one.
Boeing also briefly considered other outsize transports for the Dreamlifter role, including Antonov’s enormous An-124. With a 330,000-pound payload, greater even than that of the mighty Lockheed Martin C-5 Galaxy, and an overall length of 226 feet, it came close to what Boeing needed but came with too many maintenance and certification challenges. Here a mighty An-124 is pictured on the ramp at the Dubai Air Show. Mark Wagner
Based on the A300-600R airframe, the Beluga flew for the first time in 1994. Capable of carrying about ninety-eight thousand pounds—or almost double that of the Super Guppy—it has a usable length of almost 124 feet and can carry entire fuselage sections for every member of the Airbus family apart from the A380. Mark Wagner
So what to do? What could provide the best platform to carry the 787 sub-assemblies around, some of which—such as the combined fuselage sections or wings—would be huge? To get the right answer, Boeing undertook an exhaustive analysis of every current large freighter type in service, ranging from the 747-400F to the Antonov An-124, and decided fairly quickly that there was nothing out there to do the job it was looking for. It would have to develop its own twenty-first-century Super Guppy.
Fittingly, the company selected the legendary 747 as the most suitable candidate to create a transport that would help give birth to the latest member of the Boeing dynasty. In mid-2003, Boeing’s product development team began sketching out a concept that ballooned the existing 747 outline to remarkable proportions and, for the first time since the 747 was designed in the mid-1960s, stretched the airframe. Although having grown massively in terms of weight, range, payload, and capacity, the 747 had previously never been stretched