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A Super Guppy delivers a part for the International Space Station, 1999“It will never get off the ground.” “It’s ridiculous.” “With that large a fuselage and the present tail, it will be unstable.” So the detractors said, and unlike the detractors in most aviation stories, they were right. It was the world’s largest airplane and in many ways the most unlikely, and to one degree or another it fulfilled all these comments and predictions. The first time the Pregnant Guppy (its peculiar shape gave it the name) took off from California’s Mojave Airport under its maximum weight of 141,000 pounds, in the spring of 1963, it did manage to get aloft, but just barely. After the usual long, lumbering ground run, the landing gear was retracted, but the ship could climb no faster than the hilly ground was rising in front of it. The air speed seemed locked at 128 knots. An awed and expectant silence prevailed in the cockpit, even as the engines and propellers churned away at their noisiest level.
The town of Boron loomed dead ahead. It looked as if the Guppy’s crew would clean it out if they didn’t turn, but a turn might sink them back into the ground. The flight engineer saw that the right inboard engine was giving them trouble. He told the pilot, “Number three is overheating. Can I pull it back?”
“Don’t touch it.”
“But it will burn up!”
“Let it burn.”The strange epic of the ugly airplane that got us to the moon
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