Introduction
In 1970 Airbus company started and with this start the requirement of transporting the raw material and airplane parts also started. Earlier road transport was used for this purpose. But, to fulfill the needs of high production volume it was not possible to follow the road transportation only. Airbus started the air transport in 1972 and for this they constructed 4 "Super Guppies".
The Airbus Beluga is built by modifying Airbus A300-600 wide body airliner. This is built to carry oversized cargo and aircraft parts.
Development
Airbus Beluga is based on Airbus A300 and it shares many identical parts with Airbus A300 such as landing gears, engines, wings etc. The upper part of Beluga has approx. 25 ft. diameter. It has the same cockpit as that of A300 but it is located slightly down below the cargo ramp.
It took 2 years to construct the first Airbus Beluga. The worked started in September 1992 and it had its first flight in September 1994. The test program of Beluga was of 335 flight hours. In October 1995 the Beluga was awarded with the certification by European Aviation Safety Agency.
After the certification Airbus constructed 4 more units of Beluga. It took 1 year to construct 1 unit. The primary task of all these aircrafts is to carry the parts of aircrafts being build for final assembly.
