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Giant cargo plane helps build
Dreamliner
AP
Sunday May 20, 2007
EVERETT, Wash. - A gigantic, humpback-shaped cargo plane has been
turning heads in the skies over the Seattle area for months as it's
undergone hundreds of hours of flight tests.
It's about to become a more common sight in a lot more places,
as it begins carrying large chunks of Boeing Co.'s new 787 Dreamliner
from factories in Japan and Italy, South Carolina and Kansas to
the company's widebody assembly plant here.
It's called the Dreamlifter — a lofty name for a jet whose
bulbous fuselage has earned it no shortage of pot shots.
Scott Carson, Boeing Co.'s commercial airplanes chief, drew some
hearty laughs last year when he told a banquet hall full of aviation
enthusiasts it was a plane "only a mother could call pretty."
"Paint helps a little bit, but it's kind of like putting lipstick
on a pig," quipped Mike Bair, head of Boeing's 787 program.
Others look past its odd appearance and see a marvel of aeronautical
engineering and manufacturing logistics.
After toying with various design concepts, from a pod on top of
the plane to a large side door, engineers decided to lop off the
top of a 747-400 passenger plane, fatten up the fuselage, then add
hinges to one side of the tail so it can swing open.
Boeing buys the 747s used, strips them down and turns them into
Dreamlifters in Taipei. Once the top gets torn off, "it literally
looks like a flatbed truck," said Mike Bunney, director of
global logistics for the 787 program. "Some people have jokingly
referred to it as Topless in Taipei."
Two Dreamlifters are flying as Boeing awaits certification from
the Federal Aviation Administration. A third is being modified in
Taipei, and a fourth is waiting its turn.
At 65,000 cubic feet, the Dreamlifter's cargo capacity is more
than twice that of the 747 freighters that shipping companies like
United Parcel Service Inc. fly.
A less eye-catching but equally important piece of the Dreamlifter
puzzle is a long, 32-wheeled cargo loader that drives up to the
open-tailed freighter and pulls out fuselage sections, wings, whatever
shipment the plane is carrying.
The loader is "designed to be kind of one-stop shopping,"
Bunney said. "You can get parts in and out of the airplane
then move them around the factory site with the same device, so
it simplified the whole logistics process."
Without the Dreamlifter, Boeing would have to wait several weeks
for certain 787 parts made entirely or mostly of light, sturdy carbon-fiber
composites to arrive by sea, leaving "an unbelievable amount
of in-process inventory out bobbing around on the ocean," Bair
said.
Another problem: Some parts, like the wings and center fuselage,
are so large they won't fit in standard shipping containers.
"If we had decided to do ocean shipping, we probably would've
had to buy our own ships," Bair said.
This is the first time Boeing has designed a plane simply to play
a supporting role in the production of another plane.
Airbus SAS has been flying its own superfreighter, nicknamed the
"Beluga," since the mid-1990s to carry fuselage sections
and wings from factories around Europe to its final assembly lines
in Toulouse, France, and Hamburg, Germany.
Its fleet of five Belugas has also been used for charter missions
to transport space station modules, chemical tanks, even a large
French painting.
The Beluga is smaller than the Dreamlifter, though the bulge on
the top half of its fuselage is much more pronounced than the Dreamlifter's,
and it opens up at the nose rather than the tail.
Ironically enough, from the 1970s to early 1990s, Airbus ran a
fleet of four modified Boeing 377 Stratocruisers nicknamed "Super
Guppies" to transport plane parts from factories to final assembly
plants.
Airbus spokeswoman MaryAnne Greczyn said the Beluga will be used
to transport parts of the A350, the midsize jet Airbus is developing
to compete with the 787, but the fuselage will probably have to
be shipped some other way because it's expected to be too large
for the Beluga.
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