Flying Whale: The World's Strangest Cargo Plane
Need to move something really big across an ocean? How about putting it inside a whale!
No, not the animal, but the Airbus Beluga. It's a giant plane that got its name because of its resemblance to a beluga whale — the distinctive white animal that lives in the Arctic.
After years of carrying large objects for Airbus, these big planes are now available for companies to hire for their own uses.
Belugas are designed for outsized cargo — think helicopters or plane parts. A Beluga can carry anything up to 39 meters long, 7 meters high and 40,000 kilograms in weight. That's about 18 small cars, or four elephants — or the wing of a plane.
They've been called the world's strangest looking airplanes.
The cockpit is the same as the one on an Airbus A300-600, but above it a huge "forehead" rises up like a big balloon, making the plane look like a beluga whale. The newer models are even painted with eyes and a mouth to complete the picture.
With the planes' whale-like proportions, pilots need special training to make sure they can guide them through the wind.
The five planes that have been made available to private companies are actually about 30 years old. They're now operating as an airline of their own, called Airbus Beluga Transport, after Airbus replaced its internal fleet with newer models.
The Beluga airline made its first delivery to the US in March, carrying a satellite from France to Florida. However, the older Belugas can only fly 1,650 kilometers at a time, so the big plane had to stop for fuel three times on the way!
So maybe they can't cross oceans as well as a real beluga whale, which will swim over 2,500 kilometers from the Bering Sea to reach the seas north of Canada every summer.
However, Airbus' newer Belugas, called the BelugaXL, can fly 4,000 kilometers at a time.
