How a Lot of Airbus Jets Were Born on Boeing Wings

A340 fuselage barrel being loaded into 377SGT No. 3

With the formation of Airbus Industrie and the launch of the Airbus A300 jetliner, the different consortium partners finalized their workshare of the project- the tail section was the responsibility of the Spanish, the British were responsible for the wings, the Dutch fabricated all the moving surfaces of the wing, the Germans built the forward and aft fuselage along with the top section of the center fuselage, and the French were responsible for the nose, flight deck, control systems, the lower section of the center fuselage and final assembly of the A300. Splitting up the construction of a commercial aircraft in this manner wasn't necessarily new to the aerospace industry- after all, Boeing had about 65% of the Boeing 747 farmed out to various subcontractors with over 20,000 companies in just about every one of the fifty US states and some foreign nations. But what was novel in what Airbus was doing was that it was the very heart of the enterprise with the partner nations assuming near-equal risk. This would be how every Airbus jet would be built and each partner nation would build their sections to as near complete as possible. For Boeing, they retained oversight and control over what their 747 subcontractors would be doing and providing. For the A300, each Airbus partner wasn't overseeing each other- they were more or less having to trust that each partner would provide a finished product that met the specifications and could be easily integrated into final assembly in France. This required each firm to work in near-perfect harmony and coordination with the other consortium members. There was no margin for error- it has been said that if a Swiss watch were scaled up to the same diameter as the A300's fuselage, the tolerances on the A300 were much tighter than that of the Swiss watch!

Parts were designed in such a way to facilitate this process, but other steps were necessary for proper coordination. At the Hawker Siddeley plant in the UK that built the wings, for example, they had special jigs that the wings could be "plugged" into that replicated the fuselage center section that they would join up with in the final assembly hall in Toulouse. More difficult was getting each nation to adopt the same production techniques. During the early days, engineers at Airbus joked how easy it was to tell whether a particular join in the aircraft was done by the French or Germans. But it had to work and with great perseverance, the A300 was coming to shape. 

Surprisingly, in the early days of Airbus, the biggest problem they faced in getting the A300 into production was the logistics of having factories in France, Germany, Spain, Great Britain and the Netherlands all separated by significant distances. The straight line distance from Germany's Hamburg production facility to the final assembly hall in Toulouse was 900 miles. It was originally planned that all the large sections would be transported by sea- this was why the German Airbus facilities were in Bremen and Hamburg which had easy sea access and the Hawker facility had good road links to the port at Liverpool. Toulouse, however, is about 100 miles inland with no sea access. The original plan was to transport the fuselage and wing sections up the Garonne River from Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast. Because of the depth of the river and the size of the components, they would only be able to up about 50 miles from Bordeaux at which point the components were transferred to a road convoy- to minimize disruption along the route to Toulouse, it had to be done at night and numerous telephone poles, trees and power lines would have to be relocated. Some of the transport vehicles would be near 100-feet in length and it wasn't long before Airbus officials came to their senses and realized that this was a very inefficient and time-consuming process to get airframe components to final assembly. 

Airbus Skylink, Felix Kracht's solution for Airbus' logistical problem

The A300 production manager was a German engineer named Felix Kracht. Before joining the nascent Airbus in 1968, Kracht had worked on harmonizing production methods and standards on the Franco-German C160 Transall military transport program. About the time that the A300 program had been launched, Kracht was familiar with Aero Spacelines and its founder, Jack Conroy. Aero Spacelines was established by Conroy to convert Boeing 377 Stratocruisers into outsize cargo transports for NASA. Not only did ASI design and convert the aircraft, they also operated the aircraft as well. The first conversion was done in 1962 using a retired Stratocruiser and was called the Pregnant Guppy which transported both Titan II stages for the Gemini program and Saturn stages for the Apollo program. By 1970 a bigger and more capable Guppy had made its first flight- longer and more capacious than any of Conroy's other designs, the new Super Guppy Turbine (377SGT) was turboprop-powered. The first 377SGT made its first flight after conversion on 24 August 1970 and the second 377SGT first flew on 24 August 1972. By this point, however, ASI was in financial trouble and that's where Felix Kracht and Airbus stepped into the picture. He astutely realized its capacious fuselage and swing-nose loading were the perfect solution to the logistical problem of getting large airframe sections to Toulouse for final assembly. In 1970, Kracht had arranged for Airbus to purchase the first 377SGT with delivery in 1971. The purchase deal included a contractual commitment from ASI to build a second 377SGT as a back up for Airbus to serve as a back up for the first 377SGT. With ASI in dire financial straits in 1973 as the Apollo program was winding down, Airbus purchased the second 377SGT built. Plans then evolved once A300 production had been launched for a third and fourth 377SGT to be built for Airbus. By this point ASI was in no position to complete construction of two more aircraft, but they did complete sub-assemblies which were then completed in France. The third 377SGT first flew in 1979 and the fourth and final 377SGT first flew in 1980. 

Operating the Super Guppy fleet wasn't cheap, but in terms of time savings and efficiency, the cost was worthwhile compared to any sea/ground-based transport option. As the battle with Boeing heated up in the late 1970s, Boeing criticized what was called the Airbus Skylink program but Airbus responded by overlying a map of Boeing's subcontractors over a map of the Airbus partners to show the distances flown by the Super Guppies was shorter than the distances from Boeing's subcontractors to final assembly in Seattle. By the 1980s, though, the age of the Super Guppy fleet was becoming a significant cost center for Airbus. In 1991, the French company Aerospatiale and the German company DASA formed a joint enterprise to develop and build a replacement for the venerable Super Guppy fleet, ironically based on the A300. Construction of the Airbus Beluga began in September 1992 with the first flight taking place in 1994. A total of five Belugas have been built with the last one completed in 1999 which allowed for the retirement of the Super Guppy fleet. 

377SGT No. 4, now N941NA operated by NASA

Super Guppy No. 1 was retired in 1996 and resides at the British Aviation Heritage Museum at Bruntingthorpe awaiting proper restoration. Super Guppy No. 2 was also retired in 1996 and is on display at the Airbus facility at Toulouse and is under the care of the group Ailes Anciennes Toulouse ("Toulouse Old Wings"). The Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace at Le Bourget was offered Super Guppy No. 2 initially, but they had to decline on account of space considerations. Super Guppy No. 3 was retired in 1997 and is on display at the Deutsche Airbus facility at Hamburg Finkenwerder, Germany. Super Guppy No. 4, however, continues to earn its keep, but no longer for Airbus. In an International Space Station barter agreement, Super Guppy No. 4 was transferred to NASA in exchange for delivery to the ISS by the Space Shuttle components from the European Space Agency. Now with tail number N941NA, the NASA Super Guppy transported ISS modules destined for in-orbit assembly and currently transports launch payloads. 

As an interesting note on Super Guppy No. 4/N941NA- when Aero Spacelines was building the sub-sections for Airbus, the company found that there were no more spare Boeing 377 Stratocruisers that could be cannibalized to form the lower aft fuselage. The dismantled original Pregnant Guppy that first flew in 1962 was still available and was purchased for its lower aft fuselage which was incorporated into Super Guppy No. 4/N941NA. Now here's what's interesting- the Pregnant Guppy was converted from the third Boeing Stratocruiser prototype that made its first flight in 1948! That means that not just a significant portion of Airbus jets produced made their "first flight" on the third Stratocruiser prototype (so to speak), but so did some of the modules of the ISS. 

Further reading: 

How American Airlines Shaped the A300

How Rolls Royce Scuttled British Participation in Airbus

The Early Days of Airbus Industrie and How the A300 Got Its Name

Franz Josef Strauss: The Bavarian Politician Who Saved Airbus

Related reading:

American Airlines Picks the DC-10 (American's pick of the DC-10 is intertwined with the early history of Airbus)

Sources: Close to the Sun: How Airbus Challenged America's Domination of the Skies by Stephen Aris. Agate Books, 2002, pp 56-62. "All About Guppys" at www.allaboutguppys.com. Photos: Wikipedia, Airbus.

On this Christmas Eve, I tried to go through my books to figure out what would be an appropriate bit of aviation trivia for a night like tonight. As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, we as a nation, as a society, have seen tremendous and often chaotic changes in the past decade. From a financial crisis, wars abroad, and, from the perspective an someone who has long found enjoyment and fascination in aviation, to have seen what I have long loved used as weapon of terror in 2001, it reminded me in some ways of a similar chaotic period in our history- the late 1960s.

The Christmas Eve broadcast of Apollo 8 from lunar orbit is still the most-watched television broadcast in history and though I have seen it many times, it still gives me goosebumps as I listen to the voices of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders read from the Book of Genesis as the first human beings to travel beyond Earth orbit.



It was a fitting way to end what was one of the most traumatic years in our nation's history- the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Bobby Kennedy, and the riots at the DNC Convention in Chicago. To think that at that singular moment, a short set of ancient biblical verses read by three intrepid explorers viewing our blue planet against the harsh backdrop of deep space, would, even for just a moment, give every person who heard it pause to think of themselves not in terms of race, nationality, political affiliation or religion, but as citizens of all of humanity.



I didn't realize that there was an Emmy Award for that broadcast. For me, though, that is only the least of honors that could ever be bestowed on a moment that always ties together my love of aviation with all that is greater than any one of us can ever be.

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy Prosperous New Year to all my readers, my fans, and the collectors of my artwork!

One of the Most Important Missions of the C-133 Cargomaster: Transporting ICBMs

One of the principal missions planned for the Douglas C-133 Cargomaster was the transport of the ballistic missiles of the Strategic Air Command. With the Atlas ICBM in development and the Thor and Jupiter IRBMs already deployed in Europe, no other aircraft had the performance and capacity to move the missiles to air bases near the launch sites. With the entry into service of the Titan ICBM, the aft cargo doors of the C-133 had to be modified from the original configuration which consisted of the ramp and a single cargo door that hinged upward. As the Titan was a significantly wider missile, the single upward-hinging door was replaced by a three part unit that consisted of two doors than hinged outward to provide more clearance and a small section of the upward-hinging door at the very end of the tail. Not only did this give a wider opening, but it also added an additional 3 feet of space for the longer Titan missile.

The first Atlas missile was transported in 1959 and the first Titan and Minuteman missiles were transported on the Cargomaster in 1962. The thin skin of the Atlas was particularly challenging to protect during loading as the fit was extremely tight. A complex rail loading system was used for the Atlas and it had to be aligned within a tolerance of less than 2 mm with the cargo rails inside the Cargomaster, necessitating use of a surveryor's transit. Fuel load, tire pressure and landing gear strut compression were all closely monitoried and the loading and unloading could easily take a full day.

The solid-fueled Minuteman ICBM was easier to load but required a special cradle that had hydraulic translating jacks to align the cradle with the rails in the C-133's cargo hold. Since there was no integral winch on the Cargomaster, the Minuteman cradle had one of its own to facilitate loading. A portable winch was developed for missile loading, but it wasn't any easier for ground crews as it required a forklift to move and position.

NASA also found value in the ICBM transport capability of the C-133 Cargomaster as it was used to deliver launch vehicles to Cape Canaveral in Florida. Between 1966 and 1969, NASA operated a C-133 as tail number 928 from both Dover AFB and Ellington Field near the Johnson Space Center for over 200 flight hours. It also served in the development of the Apollo spacecraft by air dropping a boilerplate Apollo command module to test the recovery parachutes. The C-133 wasn't approved for air drops, but the cargo ramp and doors were removed and the boilerplate was dropped from a fixture in the opening. Thirty four drops were made at National Parachute Test Range at El Centro, California.

NASA went as far as to do wind tunnel testing on a twin-finned C-133 that could carry Saturn rocket stages on its back similar to what the Russians did years later with Energia rocket components on the Antonov An-225 and Myasishchev M-4 Bison. NASA eventually settled on using the Aero Spacelines Super Guppy as a more economical approach.

Source: Air Enthusiast, March/April 2004. "Forgotten Airlifter- The Short-Lived Douglas C-133 Cargomaster" by Bill Norton, p45-51.

During Eugene Cernan and Jack Schmitt's second moonwalk during Apollo 17, they used their moon rover to go five miles away from the lunar module, the furthest any human being has been during an EVA from their spacecraft. If the rover had broken down, NASA had calculated that Cernan and Schmitt had enough oxygen and cooling water in their spacesuits to walk back to the lunar lander if they averaged a speed of 1.7mph.

Source: Air & Space Smithsonian, July 2009. "Step Outside: How Humans Learned to Walk in Space" by Tony Reichhardt, p35.