There is a category of aircraft that people photograph not because it is beautiful but because it is impossible, and for thirty years the Airbus Beluga has led it. It looks like a white whale with wings — hence the name — and it exists because Airbus builds aircraft in pieces across Europe and needs to fly wings from Britain, fuselage sections from Germany and tails from Spain to the assembly lines at Toulouse and Hamburg. No ordinary freighter has a hold that shape. So Airbus built one.
The ST: a widened A300
The original, first flown in 1994 and in service from 1995, is an A300-600 airliner with its upper fuselage replaced by an enormous cargo bubble and a cockpit dropped below the cargo floor, so the whole nose swings up as a door. Five were built. The Beluga ST is 56.15 m long, spans 44.84 m, carries 47 tonnes and holds 23,000 litres of fuel. It replaced the Super Guppy, a 1950s Boeing Stratocruiser stretched into a similar shape, which had also carried NASA’s rockets.
The XL: a widened A330
As Airbus’s aircraft grew, the ST could no longer swallow both wings of an A350 at once, so from 2018 the company built the Beluga XL on an A330 airframe: 63.1 m long, 60.3 m wingspan, 50 tonnes payload, 737 km/h, and a hold 30 per cent larger. Six have been built, and they now do the factory shuttling. Pilots need special training for the bulging nose, which changes how the aircraft handles in crosswinds.
The whale becomes an airline
That freed the five older STs, and Airbus has turned them into Airbus Beluga Transport, a stand-alone cargo airline. Its chief, Benoît Lemonnier, says the outsize-cargo market has almost no aircraft left: the Antonov An-124, which carries three times the weight, is scarce since the war in Ukraine, and the single An-225 was destroyed in 2022. The Beluga cannot match the Antonov’s weight — it is built for volume, with a hold 10 per cent wider than a 747-8F’s and 50 per cent more space — but a helicopter, a satellite, a flight simulator, a boat or a jet engine fits without disassembly. Its range is about 3,000 km, so a transatlantic delivery stops in the Azores and Canada. Each aircraft has cost roughly $20 million over its twenty years; the airline turns that into revenue.
A Bangladesh connection, of sorts
Biman’s fleet is Boeing and Dhaka has never seen a Beluga, but the aircraft has a habit of turning up where something too large for any other plane must go — Bangabandhu-1 satellite’s ground equipment travelled by outsize freighter — and Airbus Beluga Transport’s pitch is precisely that it will now fly for anyone. If a Bangladeshi operator ever needs a helicopter moved across the world in one piece, this is the phone number.
Source: CNN, via Prothom Alo.
