I was working in Shorts back in 93 / 94 when we had a delegation from the Future Large Aircraft Group, later to become Airbus Military, who picked over every bit of data that Shorts had retained on the Belfast. A400M is to a very large degree the Son of Belfast.
Back in the early days of the Belfast, Shorts had a concept for a high-performance version of the aircraft involving grafting a C-141 wing-set and engines onto the Belfast fuselage. Those who can remember that far back will recall that the original FLA concept was a jet......