Looks like that Southwest pilot from last week has a new gig.
“This is your captain speaking. We should be landing in Blawnox in, oh, jeez, six hours or so. Maybe less, maybe more. Who knows…?”
It shows as a Cessna 172 but the picture is of a business jet. Looks more like a 172 pilot practicing various maneuvers.
I also watch planes in and out of the local base but they’ve started hiding them until they get about 20 miles out. What was interesting was the original attempt to do so. They created an image of the area and the planes would fly under the image. You could literally see the plane slowly vanish or reappear.
It’s a 172 now, but up to sometime last year it was the Challenger 600 pictured.
That’s one hell of a diet.
Last year Airbus set up a specialty cargo airline for the Beluga planes.
This year they shut it down.
Sounds like despite their corp-speak double talk excuses, it turns out the actual demand for outsized cargo doesn’t pay the freight.
Were you on a DC-1, by any chance?
I never understood why they built them in the first place. It was to save time over ocean travel within the European sphere of aircraft manufacture. Beyond taking high dimensional weight shipments it had no practical airlift capacity. It had the weight capacity of a DC-8 70 series. It has less than half the lift capacity of a 747 and it lacks the ease of loading with a standard k-loader. Not sure how that works with a Beluga without using a specialized loader to clear the cockpit.
They were built because the factories Airbus was using are not accessible by barge. And the narrow-gauge European road network can’t handle shipping big fuselage hunks regularly over land. So they gotta fly them from here to there.
ISTM that most of the use for the Belugas was moving A380 parts. Now that they’re not making A380s, that need has gone to zero.
Once they had no real use for the machines, they’d hoped enough other entities would find a use for very outsized but rather lightweight freight. They hoped in vain.
The article says Airbus is still using the newer/larger Beluga XLs. I think they just wanted to get some additional use out of the older fleet rather than scrapping them… and it turned out to be not worth the hassle.
That’s a great way to put it.
Running an airline, even a freight line, has a lot of fixed bureaucratic overhead. And the smaller your fleet, the harder each jet needs to work to carry its share. If you don’t have enough customer demand to keep the iron moving, you’re doomed.
Next time they should try titanium.
Few things in life seem like more of a hassle than running an air freight line. TaleSpin taught me that. Air pirates, robber barons, giant sea creatures… the list goes on.
Riding the DEI wave; Maybe a 172 that identfies as 600?
Not with this White House.
In the interest of pedantry and satisfying my total inner nerd…
The aircraft pictured is not a Challenger 600 (CL-600-1A11). It is a Challenger 605 or 650 (CL-600-2B16 604 variant). The tailcone had a different shape before the 605, and the original 600 had different engines fully enclosed in nacelles, and no winglets. The engines we see here were introduced on the Challenger 601.
Google says the registration was once applicable to a 650; this photo matches serial number 6136. It seems to have been re-registered under a different N-number.
I have a soft spot for the Challenger, thanks to some favorite clients.
Just to check, I looked up N1010US and it is a Cessna 172 (172M to be specific)
(In case the picture was right and the ID was wrong – though I suppose the N number could be incorrect)
Brian
It does appear to be a Cessna today, and that’s almost certainly the plane with the bizarre flight path. The screenshot has an outdated photo, though, of a plane that previously was registered under that number.
I just nerded out on looking for a more specific identification of the photo.
An Air Tractor flies to Europe. Air Tractors are agricultural sprayer aircraft (and some other variations).
From Reddit:
Happened last night. The app says it’s an AT-802 Air Tractor, the registration according to the FAA is temporary, but is assigned to the Air Tractor company. But this is well beyond the Air Tractor’s usual range and service ceiling. According to Wikipedia its service ceiling is only 13,000 ft, but this one got up to around 20,000 ft. Too slow for a jet, too long range for most prop planes. Usually I might think supplemental fuel tanks, but the AT is too small for those, way above its service ceiling, and also… why?
Air tractor 802’s can have a ferry system installed and the hopper filled with 800Gal of jet fuel. Allows for pretty insane ranges and a long long time in the seat, usually without autopilot.
Apparently they have supplemental oxygen and drop in IFR panels for the transit.
Flight radar App actually shows two different Air Tractors parked at Santa Maria, Azores, which apparently arrived with an hour between them. Both came from Portland, Maine. Doubt it’s a glitch because the flight path is slightly different and it’s got two separate registrations.