Up there in the sky: it's the Big Beluga

Is it a plane? Is it a whale? No, it’s super Beluga. The smiling BelugaXL made its maiden flight Thursday and you can bet it turned a few heads in the French town of Toulouse. The first of five BelugaXL ‘s landed at Toulouse-Blagnac, France, at 2:41 pm local time after a successful first flight lasting four hours and 11 minutes. Based on the A330-200 freighter and powered by Trent 700 engines, the new freighter aims to address the need for more transport capacity as Airbus ramps up production, particularly of its A350 XWB. It has an additional 30 percent carrying capacity and can carry two A350 wings at a time. The aircraft is due to enter service in 2019 and will gradually replace the smaller BelugaST transporters. The five aircraft will be built between 2019 and 2023 and will transport aircraft components from 11 destinations. In the cockpit for the first flight were Captain Christophe Cail, co-pilot Bernardo Saez-Benito Hernandez and test-flight engineer Jean Michel Pin.  They were accompanied by flight-test-engineers Laurent Lapierre and Philippe Foucault, who monitored aircraft systems and real-time performance. Following the first flight, the BelugaXL will undergo some 600 hours of flight test over 10 months to achieve Type Certification and entry into service later in 2019.

Changes introduced with the new plane include a  lowered cockpit, a wider cargo bay structure and a distinctive rear-end and tail. Airbus has been using ungainly planes to transport aircraft components since the 1970s when it began operating a modified Boeing Stratocruiser from the 1940s known as the Super Guppy. It added two more Super Guppies – so named for their resemblance to a pregnant guppy – to its initial fleet of two in the 1980s. The first Beluga was based on the A300 and initially flew in 1994. The A300-600ST had a maximum payload of 47 tonnes and a  freight compartment that was 7.31m (24 ft) in diameter and 37.7 m (124 ft) long. The three-storey BelugaXL is 63.1m long and 18.9m wide.