Post by Galvin on Dec 18, 2006 0:46:07 GMT -7
www.impactwire.com/article.asp?id=2859
I have been seeing this thing on the ramp for the last few weeks when I drive past Boeing Field and yesterday it passed overhead my house on a test flight. It is rather startling when you first see it in the air, kind of like a regular 747 on steroids, which I guess is exactly what it is when you think about it.
I was in an Aeronca L-3 on my third solo cross country flight back in the fall of 1965 when I encountered the first "Pregnant Guppy" on a test flight while passing over the Camarillo area near Ventura,CA. It looked like a cartoon of a whale.
I had watched the entire process of Jack Conroy's conversion of that Boeing Stratocruiser airliner into a behemoth designed to fly oversize cargo take place on the west side of Van Nuys airport and thought it was the biggest airplane I had ever seen. The work was done in the former On Mark facility that had just recently given up on converting B-26 bombers into high speed executive transports, put out of business by the Lear Jet among others.
That first airplane proved to be the smallest of all the Boeing 377 conversions and was followed by quite a few others, nearly all stretched and some with turboprops. Airbus used a couple of them to transport large airframe sections from subcontractors in Europe to the main plant in Toulouse for years. They were eventually supplanted by the "Beluga" conversion that is now doing the bulk of the oversize stuff.
But this Large Cargo Freighter or LCF conversion of a Boeing 747-400 is just flat out huge in comparison to its predecessors.
As it passed over yesterday on its way down the ILS into BFI I couldn't help thinking that it would not look out of place with a silver paint job and "Goodyear" written down both sides.
I have been seeing this thing on the ramp for the last few weeks when I drive past Boeing Field and yesterday it passed overhead my house on a test flight. It is rather startling when you first see it in the air, kind of like a regular 747 on steroids, which I guess is exactly what it is when you think about it.
I was in an Aeronca L-3 on my third solo cross country flight back in the fall of 1965 when I encountered the first "Pregnant Guppy" on a test flight while passing over the Camarillo area near Ventura,CA. It looked like a cartoon of a whale.
I had watched the entire process of Jack Conroy's conversion of that Boeing Stratocruiser airliner into a behemoth designed to fly oversize cargo take place on the west side of Van Nuys airport and thought it was the biggest airplane I had ever seen. The work was done in the former On Mark facility that had just recently given up on converting B-26 bombers into high speed executive transports, put out of business by the Lear Jet among others.
That first airplane proved to be the smallest of all the Boeing 377 conversions and was followed by quite a few others, nearly all stretched and some with turboprops. Airbus used a couple of them to transport large airframe sections from subcontractors in Europe to the main plant in Toulouse for years. They were eventually supplanted by the "Beluga" conversion that is now doing the bulk of the oversize stuff.
But this Large Cargo Freighter or LCF conversion of a Boeing 747-400 is just flat out huge in comparison to its predecessors.
As it passed over yesterday on its way down the ILS into BFI I couldn't help thinking that it would not look out of place with a silver paint job and "Goodyear" written down both sides.