Airbus Beluga: A closer look at the super transporter and world's strangest-looking aircraft

Airbus Beluga may be called as the world's strangest-looking airplane but one thing is for sure, it is also a 'super transporter', in the big sense.


For a feature, we considered this Airbus Beluga operating in the French city of Toulouse. The aircraft is popularly known as the "Beluga" for one obvious reason, its close resemblance to the real-world's Arctic whale.


The Airbus Beluga is coded as A300-600ST, where ST stands for 'Super Transporter'. The name convention is made as such due to the aircraft's significant role in the Europian air transportation.


Airbuses have long been used as cargo planes. If you try to cull from the archives, Airbus, in fact used another strange and bizzare looking aircraft called the "Super Guppy".

Today, Beluga's maximum payload is at 47 tons. While other cargo aircrafts exceed the Beluga in terms of ton capacity, the former stands out in terms of ability to carry oversized materials like aircraft parts and the like.