L’world aeronautics is in mourning. From the first hours of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, during Russian attacks on the airfield of Gostomel, an industrial site of Antonov about twenty kilometers north of Kiev, the hangar which housed the Antonov An-225 was the subject of a fire destroying, or at least damaging, the cargo plane, the largest aircraft in the world. If the Airbus A380 is the largest passenger aircraft (up to 853), then the An-225 Mriya is the largest at all (wingspan of 88.4 m and length of 84 m). In the Guinness World Records, it has a long list of “mores”, with 253 tons of cargo, a single piece of 186 tons, transport of the longest piece with 42.1 m, etc.
It is a six-jet engine powered by six Ivchenko-Progress D-18T turbofan engines, also developed in Ukraine. Reputed to be reliable, these also equip Antonov’s little brother, the An-124, widely used for hire by the French army for the logistics of its external operations.
Single copy
Manufactured in the 1980s in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for the USSR space program, the An-225 was produced in only one copy to transport the Buran shuttle on its fuselage. It participated in the Paris Air Show in June 1989 and then in 2001. Returned to civilian life as a freight carrier, the Antonov An-225 Mriya landed recently, on April 19, 2020, at Paris-Vatry airport. Some 150 tonnes of equipment to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, including 8 million FFP2 masks, were then landed from China.