Why does the A330 sit nose down?

To provide for the heavier A330 MTOW, allow increased takeoff rotation angles, and give better nacelle-ground clearance for the larger fan engines, a stronger, longer main gear was needed. With the A330/A340 longer main gear and the A300 nose gear, the A330/A340 have a distinct nose down attitude on the ground.

Why is the A330 slanted?

Boarding (and, to a lesser extent, deboarding) would be slowed down slightly by the passengers having to negotiate a sloped cabin floor (especially those having to drag very heavy pieces of luggage uphill in the process).

Why does the A330 point down?

The aircraft has a distinctive blister on the underside of the nose to accommodate a revised nosegear layout. The existing nose gear assembly is retained, the leg attachment points have been to raise the nose height to address the nose-down pitch that is a characteristic of the A330 (and the A340).

Why does the a330f have a bump?

Modifying the landing gear In the end, it settled on lowering the leg attachment points to raise the nose slightly when the aircraft was parked. This modification required a larger gear bay to house the nose gear, which required some additional housing – hence the bulge.

Why is the landing gear tilted?

The main reason that the landing gear tilts is simply to allow it to fit best into its storage compartment in the fuselage. Space on an aircraft is precious.

Why are planes landing gear tilted?

Every aircraft landing gear that has a bogie beam supporting two or more axles, right from the Boeing 707 of the 1960s which has a tilt mechanism on each main landing gear. The purpose of the tilt mechanism is to allow proper truck alignment for retraction into the wheelwell.

Why is the A330 so popular?

The A330 is reliable, spacious, comfortable, and can move large numbers of people a long way in a single leap. There’s a lot to like about the plane and nowhere has the A330 proved more popular than in the Asia-Pacific region.

Is the A330 200 still in production?

The last A330-200 was delivered to OpenSkies (operating for LEVEL) on October 1, 2019. The last A330-300 built was flown to Brussels Airport on February 28, 2020, and Aer Lingus took delivery on 4 March 2020, while four completed A330-300s for troubled Hong Kong Airlines were still undelivered.

Why does nose landing gear retract forward?

The most common configuration is retracting nose gear forward, because it’s easy to make space for it there leaving more space for the cargo hold.

Why is landing gear retracted after take off?

Normally, the landing gear is retracted after lift-off when the airplane has reached an altitude where, in the event of an engine failure or other emergency requiring an aborted takeoff, the airplane could no longer be landed on the runway. The climb characteristics of the particular airplane.

Does the Airbus A330 have a nose-down angle?

The passenger versions of the A330 have a small but noticeable nose-down angle when sitting on the ground: (Image by contri at Flickr, via russavia at Wikimedia Commons .)

What is the strange lump on the Airbus A330F?

The A340s middle landing gear, the flat bottoms of the 737’s engines, and the Zorro-like ‘mask’ of the Airbus A350. And it’s not just passenger planes that can sometimes have these odd little features; cargo planes do too. One of the most noticeable design features of the Airbus A330F is a strange lump just in front of the nose gear.

Why do some planes have such long tails?

Lots of airplanes are like that, sometimes because of changes made during development, but more typically after fuselage stretches where the main gear had to be made longer to keep the extended tail off the ground during rotation (the flying pencil CRJ1000, which I used to be type rated on, feels like a backwards taildragger in that regard).

What is the difference between a 340 and a 330?

The middle leg (2 wheels for 340-200/300, 4 wheels for 340-500/600) is mounted on all the 340s and none of the 330s. On the 330 the space is used by a body fuel tank. The middle gear is used due to the extra weight of the 340.