2023-08-13 04:32:44
Introduction
B-377PG Pregnant Guppy
Role Civil cargo Manufacturer Aero Spacelines Crew 5 First flight (The first flight or maiden flight of an aircraft is the first opportunity for it to take…) September 19, 1962 Entry into service September 1963 Dimensions (In common sense, the notion of dimension refers to the size; the dimensions of a room…) Length (The length of an object is the distance between its two extremities…) 43.05 m Wingspan (The wingspan is the distance between the ends of the wings. The term is valid for…) 38.71 m Wing area 164.3 m² Mass (The term mass is used to designate two quantities attached to one…) and carrying capacity Max. vacuum (Vacuum is usually defined as the absence of matter in a spatial area.) 41.28 t Max. at take-off (Take-off is the transitional phase during which an aircraft passes from the state…) 60.33 t Freight (The transport of goods is a regulated economic activity, both by each…) 13,155 kg Engine Pratt & Whitney 4 engines (Pratt & Whitney is the name of an American aircraft engine manufacturer whose production is…) R-4360 Wasp Major Power (The word power is used in several areas with a particular meaning 🙂 unitary 2,574 kW
(3,500 hp) Performance Maximum cruising speed (The cruising speed of an aircraft is the speed corresponding to the engine speed…) 378 km/h Maximum speed (We distinguish:) 386 km/h
modifier
The Aero Spacelines B-377PG Pregnant Guppy is a cargo plane (A transport plane or cargo plane is a plane intended to transport equipment or…) specially designed to transport the rocket elements necessary for the realization of the program Apollo space.
The idea
Rocket accelerators (Rocket may refer to:) Saturn V (Saturn V is the space rocket that was used by NASA for …), vector (In mathematics, a vector is an element of a space vectorial, which allows…) essential to the conquest of the moon (The conquest of the Moon is an epic included between the launching of the first programs…) in which the NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“National Administration of…), were cylinders 12 m long and 5.5 m in diameter (In a circle or a sphere, the diameter is a line segment passing through the center…). Built at Douglas Aircraft in Sacramento (The city of Sacramento is the capital of the State of California, in the United States. It was…), California, they were to be transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida, place of the launches. transport (Transport is the act of carrying something, or someone, from one place to another, the most…) road or rail was excluded and the largest aircraft (An aircraft, according to the official definition of the International Civil Aviation Organization…) available cargo was far from having the necessary volume. Designed to be vertical and full of fuel (A fuel is a fuel that powers a heat engine. This transforms…), they therefore had to be loaded empty onto a barge and transported by sea via Panama and its canal. A journey of 15 days (The day or the day is the interval which separates sunrise from sunset; that’s the…), under the constant supervision of 5 engineers who had great difficulty in preventing certain parts from arrive deformed or corroded.
It seems that it was during a dinner with friends that Jack Conroy and Lee Mansdorf came up with the project (A project is an irreversible commitment to an uncertain, non-reproducible result…) to produce an aircraft capable of meeting the need ( The needs are at the level of the interaction between the individual and the environment. It is obvious…) from NASA: a cargo plane large enough to be able to transport in 24 hours (The hour is a unit of measurement 🙂 and with minimal risk Saturn V boosters from California to Florida. Conroy was not a technician but an intuitive pilot and a visionary. Pilot of the Air Force (The word force can designate a mechanical power on things, and also, metaphorically, a …), he had broken a transcontinental speed record on F-86 in 1955 (Operation Boomerang). He aspired to advance the world (The word world can designate:) of aviation. Mansdorf was a broker, buying and reselling aircraft the Majors no longer had use for. But at the time it had an increasing number of Boeing 377 Stratocruiser (The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser was an aircraft, passenger version of the Boeing 367 Stratofreighter …) and KC-97 Stratotanker which seemed to be able to serve as a basis for the future freighter.
An impressive aircraft
The Pregnant Guppy was therefore presented as a monoplane (A monoplane is an airplane having a single pair of wings as a lifting plane. Since the end…) with low wing cantilever with train (A train is a guided vehicle circulating on rails A train is composed of…) retractable tricycle (A tricycle is a cycle with three wheels.). The wing, the landing gear (Landing designates, in the etymological sense, the fact of reaching the mainland….) and the engines were those of the Boeing (Boeing (official name in English The Boeing Company) is the ‘one of the greatest builders…) 377 Stratocruiser, everything (The whole included as a whole of what exists is often interpreted as the world or…) like the lower part of the fuselage (The fuselage designates the envelope of an airplane which generally receives the load…), from the cockpit to the empennage. But the upper fuselage was considerably bulkier, with a 6 m headstock for a theoretical payload of 15,420 kg. For safety reasons it was limited to 13,155 kg for commercial flights. It had originally been envisaged to make a fuselage whose upper part would be hinged on the side, the space modules being loaded by crane. This idea was quickly abandoned in favor of a fully detachable rear fuselage section at the trailing edge. A collapsible wheeled frame, traveling with the aircraft, therefore had to be fixed under the rear fuselage, then 32 bolts to be loosened to allow the rear fuselage to be removed.
The main weakness of the Pregnant Guppy was in fact its motorization, the 3500 hp Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major engines being unreliable and impossible to restart (The word “road” derives from the Latin (via) rupta, literally “ way…) in flight. The numerous tests carried out by the FAA and then by NASA showed, however, that despite the plump shapes of the fuselage, the aircraft remained manageable in flight with two failed engines on the same side. But as a flight between Long Beach and the Kennedy Space Flight Center was immobilized for three and a half days in October 1963 due to an engine change (An engine is a device that transforms non-mechanical energy (wind, chemical, etc.), NASA asked Aero Spacelines to preposition a number of spare engines along the route to avoid such delays!
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