World’s strangest-looking plane gets its own airline

The Airbus Beluga, one of the world’s strangest airplanes, now has its own airline.

The odd-looking, oversized cargo plane — a favourite among planespotters around the world — has been in service for close to two decades. It mainly transports aircraft parts between Airbus’ manufacturing facilities spread throughout Europe.

Now, a new version of the Beluga is replacing the original fleet, which has gone on to power a standalone freight airline called Airbus Beluga Transport.

“There are very few options on the market for oversize items,” says Benoît Lemonnier, head of Airbus Beluga Transport. “Most often there’s a need to partially dismantle a payload to make it fit in an aircraft — whereas in the Beluga, it will just fit.”

The original fleet

The very first Beluga was originally known as the Airbus Super Transporter. But after its nickname — derived from the resemblance to the white Arctic whale — gained popularity, Airbus decided to rename the aircraft Beluga ST, retaining the original name in the acronym.

It first flew in 1994 and entred service in 1995, followed over the years by four more examples, the last of which was rolled out in late 2000.

“The Beluga was developed to transport large sections of Airbus aircraft from its factories in France, Germany, the UK, Spain and Turkey to the final assembly lines located in Toulouse and Hamburg,” explains Lemonnier. “It is a very special design, because it’s actually a transformation of an A300-600 that had its entire head removed and then equipped with special fuselage shells, a bigger door and dedicated flight equipment.”

Before the Beluga, Airbus was using a fleet of Super Guppies, modified versions of 1950s Boeing Stratocruiser passenger planes that had previously been in service with NASA to ferry spacecraft parts. Now, history is repeating itself as the original Beluga is being replaced by a more spacious and advanced model, the Beluga XL.

Longer and bigger than the ST, the Beluga XL is capable of carrying both wings, rather than just one, of the Airbus A350, the company’s latest long-haul aircraft that rivals the Boeing 787 and 777.

“The XL is based on a much more modern platform, the A330,” Lemonnier adds. “Since 2018, six XLs have been built, and the latest one will be delivered very soon to the internal Airbus airline. The Beluga XL can fully substitute the Beluga ST on the internal Airbus network, so the STs can become available for alternative service.”

BelugaXL no5 over the Elbe river in Hamburg approaching Airbus Finkenwerder site. (Airbus Operations GmbH 2023 / Stefan Kruijer)

Old but not out

The original Beluga STs might be approaching two decades of service, but according to Lemonnier, there’s still a lot of life left in them: “Depending on how often they fly, they may remain in service for 20 more years, easily.”

One of them will keep working for Airbus and ferry aircraft parts, while the remaining four will be exclusively in the fleet of the new cargo airline.

It’s not the first time that the Belugas are used outside Airbus, however. “We had some chartered flights between 2000 and 2010, when there was some capacity left and the Beluga were used to transport helicopters and satellites,” he says.

Then, in 2022, the company completed a dozen test missions in preparation for the airline launch. “The difference now is that we are fully standalone, so we can be flexible for our customers and accept date changes, for example, meaning we can stay in one area to wait for a payload — something that would probably be impossible for the Airbus internal airline to do,” Lemonnier says.

Because the Beluga ST’s cargo hold is 50 per cent higher and 10 per cent wider than regular cargo aircraft — like the Boeing 747-8F — it is generally used to transport voluminous items such as satellites, helicopters, aircraft engines, flight simulators, sailing boats and army vehicles.

Flying on the Beluga can be a little different than on regular aircraft, Lemonnier notes.

“It can have a sensitive behavior in the wind due to its big head, and that’s why it requires specific training for pilots,” he says. “But otherwise it flies very much like an A300-600 — the cockpit is totally unchanged.”

One limitation is the range of 3,000 kilometres (1,600 nautical miles), which means that trips from Europe to the United States require up to two refueling stops, generally in the Azores and Canada.

Another is the maximum cargo weight of 40 metric tons; because the Beluga is designed for volume, rivals like the Antonov AN-124 can carry three times as much weight, and the former largest airplane in the world — the AN-225, destroyed in 2022 — had capacity for a whopping 250 tons.

A niche market

The intended operation for the Airbus Beluga Transport is quite different to standard commercial freighter operations, according to Gary Crichlow, an aviation analyst at consultancy firm AviationValues.

“Transporting helicopters, satellites and other large assets brings certain operational complexities that transporting packages for Amazon would not normally have to deal with,” he says. “For example, the maximum altitude at which a helicopter’s structure is certificated sets the maximum altitude at which the transport flight can operate.”

Crichlow also notes that while the Beluga ST’s capacity of 40 metric tons pales in comparison to Antonov aircraft, there are five Beluga STs, and Airbus advertises them as featuring one of the most voluminous cargo holds of any civil or military aircraft flying today.

“Clearly Airbus is not aiming to be Amazon Prime,” he says, “but having amortized each Beluga’s €183 million (US$199 million) cost over the past 20 years, this would appear to be a relatively low-risk opportunity to earn revenue from a niche of the freighter market.”