One of the aviation world’s most hotly anticipated planes, the Airbus Beluga XL, has just completed a key round of testing at Hawarden Airport in Wales, ahead of entering service later in 2019. 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 five – will be one of the biggest aircraft in the skies.
You won’t be able to travel in it, though. This is a super-transporter cargo plane, designed by Airbus to fly its aircraft components between European production sites and its final assembly lines in Toulouse, Hamburg and Tianjin.
As for the “cute†design of the plane, it was first called “the flying whale†due to its bulbous shape. However, the design is functional – the whale-like nose makes the plane more aerodynamic. The cargo bay is gigantic and can carry two A350 wings at a time, whereas the old Beluga’s design could account for one. What really changes is the behaviour of the aircraft at the rear, at the bottom of the cargo bay. The vertical tail plane has been lifted by more than two meters to get it out of the flow behind the cargo bay, and there is special acceleration on the horizontal tail plane to give it stability.
The XL is the successor to the Beluga, or the Airbus A300-600ST, which has been in operation since 1995. Despite the plane’s odd appearance, for the pilots, it is essentially an A330. They will be trained on the A330 and then get a Delta qualification to enable them to fly the Beluga XL.
