The Beluga, the B-52 and other odd shapes
Earlier today aircraft got their own shape: about two hundred common types, built to their published span, length and tail height. That list was the types we hear most often. It left out a lot of aircraft people actually go looking for, so the table now covers every designator our receivers have ever heard, as long as the FAA or EUROCONTROL database lists it. That is 407 types.
Some of them needed parts the generator didn't have.
The Airbus Beluga. The A300-600ST and the BelugaXL carry a huge cargo bulb above a normal fuselage, with the cockpit sitting low in front of it. The model now draws that bulb as its own body on top of the fuselage, and the windscreen moves down onto the chin. The Boeing Dreamlifter gets a smaller bulb behind its 747 hump. Span, length and height come from EUROCONTROL like everything else. How tall the bulb looks is our own proportion, because neither source publishes it, and we checked it against photos on our test sheet.
The B-52. Eight engines hang in four pairs, and the aircraft sits on two main gear legs along the fuselage with small outrigger wheels near the wingtips. Both are drawn that way now.
The V-22 Osprey. The engines and rotors sit at the wingtips. We draw it in aeroplane mode, with the rotors facing forward, which is how it cruises.
The E-3 Sentry. A 707 with a flat radar dome on two struts above the rear fuselage.
Three engines. A Falcon 7X or a DC-10 has three engines, and the two sources sometimes disagree on the count. We settle it with the source's own layout text: an engine built into the fin means three, engines in pairs under the wings or at the back mean an even number. The other number is kept next to it, the same way we keep disagreeing dimensions.
Fighters and trainers. Military jets with no layout data used to fall back to a business jet. Short jets with a wing much shorter than the fuselage now get a fighter-like body instead, so an F-15 no longer looks like a Learjet.
A few things are still approximate. The V-22 tail gets an extra centre fin, and the MD-11's middle engine sits a little low on the fin. Thirteen types are still missing, mostly kit planes that neither database covers, plus the C-5M and the E-767, which have no pages in either source.
If a type you know looks wrong, tell us in Discord and say which part.