Russian forces have destroyed Ukraine’s flagman aircraft An-225 Mriya, the world’s biggest cargo plane, Ukraine’s state defence conglomerate Ukroboronprom said on Telegram. The aircraft was destroyed in an attack by Russian troops on the Hostomel airport outside Kiev, Ukroboronprom added on Sunday.
The restoration of the plane will cost more than $3 billion and will take a long time, it said.
The An-225 Mriya, designed in the 1980s, is the longest and the heaviest airplane ever built. It was capable of carrying up to 640 tons of cargo, Xinhua news agency reported.
The story of the An-225 begins back in the 1960 and ’70s when the Soviet Union was locked in a race into space with the United States. By the end of the 1970s, the need arose for transporting large and heavy loads from their places of assembly to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the sprawling spaceport in the deserts of Kazakhstan that was the launchpad for Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering space voyage of 1961.
The cargo in question was the Buran spacecraft, the Soviet Union’s answer to NASA’s Space Shuttle. Since there were at the time no aeroplanes capable of carrying it, the Antonov company was ordered to develop one.
The aeroplane is based on the smaller AN-124 and retains the nose design allowing it to kneel and load cargo through its large open front. The empennage of the aircraft was redesigned with twin vertical stabilisers to enable the carriage of large external loads, leaving it without a rear cargo door.
Only one AN-225 was ever built by the Antonov company, which came up with the design. Romantically named Mriya, which stands for ‘a dream’, it first took flight in 1988 and was in service until recently.
Powering the AN-225 are six D-18 engines. Its cargo loading bay measures 43 meters long by 6.4 meters wide by 4.4 meters tall, with 1300 cubic meters of usable cargo area capable of carrying just over 250 tonnes. All of this weight is supported by the main landing gear featuring 14 wheels per side and a dual front gear with 4 wheels. It has a top speed of 800kmph and is capable of travelling 15,400 km in one go.
The AN-225’s maximum total weight at take-off is 640 tons. That is more than twice as heavy as the Statue of Liberty.
After the cancellation of the Buran the AN-225 was stored until 2001. However, in the following year, it enter commercial cargo service. Till date, the aircraft has carried food stuffs, military equipment, oil and gas machinery and relief supplies all over the world.
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