Boeing RC-1

The Boeing RC-1, short for Resource Carrier 1, was a design for an enormous cargo aircraft meant to haul oil and minerals out of the northern reaches of Alaska and Canada where ice-free ports were not available. It was optimised for short-haul missions only, carrying cargo to places for loading onto ships, trains or pipelines, and depending on the role was nicknamed Brute Lifter or Flying Pipeline. The basic design had a rectangular wing spanning almost 500 feet, twelve Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines and 56 wheels in the main landing gear, and carried 2.3 million pounds of cargo in two underwing pods and the fuselage; it would have been roughly twice the size and mass of the Antonov An-225 but carried about five times the payload. It was designed in the early 1970s, and the jet fuel price rise after the 1973 oil crisis made the project uneconomical.