New Bizarre Beluga Aircraft Swims Through the Skies

No, this is not a plane made for white whales. The new Beluga Airbus can (and has) easily been considered the world’s most bizarre aircraft.

Shaped like the whale of the same name, the airbus A300-600ST was developed by the European company Airbus and is meant to carry not passengers, but extra-large and oddly shaped packages. Airbus simply cut off the top of a normal Airbus aircraft and added a second fuselage (reminiscent of a bubble) on top of the original fuselage.

© Kunertus | Dreamstime

Thanks to its unusual shape, the Beluga serves as a vessel to ship plane parts — like entire wings and fuselage — that need to be added to or incorporated into the construction of planes. Other options for shipping such parts include ground transportation or simply constructing a bigger plane, but Airbus considered the costs, the labor, and the environmental damage involved in creating a new vehicle entirely from scratch. Instead, the engineers embraced their existing line of aircraft and enhanced one of their plane models that is actually no longer in production.

If you’re interested in renting this strange-looking plane, private charters are available through Airbus’s website. An even larger Beluga is scheduled for production and should be ready to hit the skies in 2019.