The Khan Transport is a medium-sized craft painted in the trademark crimson-and-white color scheme of Khan Industries' cargo fleet. It is one of the most identifiable transport planes of modern times. Each one is exactly alike and perfectly identical, flying in vast numbers and strengthening the dominance of the Khan Industries name. They are featured in the animated series TaleSpin.
History[]
Khan Transports are built according to rigid design specifications to ensure complete similarity between individual planes. Machines in Shere Khan's many factories and construction plants process the raw materials and components that make up the transport, and send them down to an assembly line to await inclusion in the final aircraft. Khan Transports are heavily mass-produced. Presently, there are several hundred of these craft in operation all over the globe.
The Khan Transport is perhaps one of the few medium-class cargo planes in the world to feature a triple engine configuration — two on the wings, one on the nose just below the cockpit. This system increases the maintenance time for the transport but serves as an effective precaution against engine failure. If one of the wing engines dies, the center one can compensate enough to bring the plane in for an emergency landing. However, the loss of two engines can prove disastrous, especially if the center engine is one of them.
Because of the advanced controls and complex flight systems, flying the plane is no easy task. It takes a skilled and dedicated pilot to control the Khan Transport successfully. Pilots who fly the transports are company veterans or applicants who have had significant experience with aircraft of all sorts, and understand both old and new aviation technology. Even so, most Khan Industries flyers prefer to bring along a copilot to manage secondary duties and assist in navigation.
Due to the types of business Shere Khan so frequently deals in, Khan Transports routinely carry valuable and expensive cargoes ranging from jewelry and antiques to gold bars. This makes the transports favorite targets of Air Pirates, who lurk near the shipping lanes to prey on them. For this reason, every Khan Transport in service is fitted with a machine gun turret manned by the copilot, and the newest planes have hulls of armored steel. Though not able to completely stop a determined attack, the cannons and armor may be enough to buy the pilot the time he needs to steer the plane into a cloud bank and shake his pursuers.
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