Airbus engineers designed a bizarrely shaped cargo plane known as the Beluga solely because they needed a vehicle large enough to transport entire sections of other airplanes across Europe.

A closer look

Airbus engineers designed a bizarrely shaped cargo plane known as the Beluga solely because they needed a vehicle large enough to transport entire sections of other airplanes across Europe. When building commercial airliners, the wings might be manufactured in the United Kingdom, the tail in Spain, and the main fuselage in Germany, creating a massive logistical nightmare for the final assembly line in France. Instead of relying on agonizingly slow shipping barges, they simply took a standard wide-body jet and inflated the top half of its fuselage until it resembled a wildly disproportionate flying whale with a massive forehead. The front nose cone actually swings completely open, allowing crews to slide the entire wing of a different aircraft directly into its cavernous belly. It is essentially the aviation equivalent of a Russian nesting doll, proving that the aerospace industry's solution to literally any transport problem is just to build an even uglier and more bulbous flying machine!