At times it has used the Bombardier 415, a Canadian plane designed to fight fires.
Among other things the double-decker plane, designed to carry 555 passengers, needs disembarking tubes that reach both decks.
4. Individually design orbital space planes created to carry out their group's mission; compare designs and create a final plane design; present missions and plane designs to the class.
The Pentagon would rather buy unmanned aircraft to gather intelligence in Afghanistan and accelerate the testing for the F-35, a new plane designed to attack ground targets.
The A400M is a four-engine turboprop plane designed to replace the aging C-130 Hercules, made by Lockheed Martin, and the French-German C-160 Transall, which make up the bulk of European military transport aircraft.
Each of the interim vehicles weighs just 19 tons and can easily drive on and off the C-130 transport plane designed to land on short, even unimproved forward airstrips.
One theory is that it is a spy plane, designed to catch savvy targets that know how to go to ground when spy satellites which have predictable orbits are overhead.
"They're not exactly leaping off the runway," said Paul Buxton-Carr, a Canadian pilot, as he watched the potbellied plane, designed to hunt submarines, climb toward its latest mission: dousing wildfires in the American West.
An instrument on NASA's highflying ER-2 plane designed to measure nitrogen-rich gases instead detected humongous particles containing nitric acid.
Boeing sales staff still has to answer questions about the viability of a plane designed to cruise so close to Mach 1, the speed of sound, where conditions become notoriously unstable.
