Flickr/BriYYZThe European airplane maker Airbus is based in Toulouse, France, but produces planes in the UK, Spain, Germany, and China.
To transport the wings and fuselages of half-built planes from one factory to another, it needed a plane bigger than any standard cargo jet.
So it built the Beluga.
Developed in the 1990s and based on the A300 (the wings, engines, landing gear, and lower portion of the fuselage are the same), the Beluga has one of the biggest cargo holds in the world.
It's the best way to get the body of a jumbo jet, a fleet of helicopters, or even a priceless painting across the planet. It's also one of the strangest-looking planes in the sky.
Recently, Airbus celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Beluga's inaugural flight on Sept. 13, 1994.
After of two decades of service, Airbus has decided the Beluga's service life is coming to an end. The airplane maker announced this week that it planned to design and build a new generation of Beluga transports based on its A330 twin-engined jet.
As the current Belugas near retirement, let's take a moment to appreciate the awesomeness of this truly capable, yet very odd-looking piece of aviation engineering.