On This Day: Remembering the Dream
Hi from Brooke In The Air. A somber reminder for you today…
The Antonov AN-225 Mriya taking off from its base at Antonov Airport, Hostomel, Kiev, Ukraine.
About a year and a half ago, we lost one largest aircraft to see active service.
The Antonov AN-225 taking off from Bishkek Airport, Kyrgyzstan.
The Antonov 225 or AN-225, “Mriya” (“Dream” in Ukrainian) was the world’s largest cargo plane that weighed around 285 gross tons when empty. It was the only one of it's kind over built. And when completed, it was even bigger than the the largest civilian airliner in modern service, the Airbus A380 Superjumbo aircraft. It was also bigger than it's “little brother,” the Antonov An-124 which is still in service, and is about the size of a USAF C-5 Galaxy, and the Boeing 747-400F, the freighter variant of the popular “Queen of the Skies.”
Early version of the AN-225 carrying the Soviet space shuttle, the Buran.
On 21st December of 1988, the An-225 performed its maiden flight; only one aircraft was ever completed, although a second airframe with a slightly different configuration was partially built and remained in its hangar in Ukraine. After a brief period of use supporting the Soviet space program (it was first designed to carry the Soviet copycat of the American space shuttle, the Buran), the aircraft was subsequently mothballed during the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed and the new independent nation of Ukraine tried to find itself.
Towards the turn of the century, Ukraine’s government decided to get Antonov to refurbish the An-225 and reintroduce it for commercial operations, carrying oversized payloads for the operator Antonov Airlines. Antonov Airlines was a subsidiary of the Antonov Aviation Company, operating as an exclusive cargo division and partly state owned.
The AN-225 Mriya participated in numerous humanitarian missions especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The sole purpose of the Myria in its post-Soviet life was to carry heavy and often humanitarian cargo for considerable distances; at far longer ranges than most conventional cargo aircraft on a single load of fuel.
The aircraft's last commercial mission was from the 2nd to the 5th of February in 2022, to collect almost 90 tons of COVID-19 test kits from Tianjin, China, and deliver them to Billund, Denmark, via Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. From there, it returned on 5 February to its base at Antonov Airport in Hostomel, outside Kiev, to undergo an engine swap.
She was destroyed last year at Kiev’s Antonov Airport in Hostomel, an otherwise unremarkable suburb outside Kiev, caught in a crossfire between defending Ukrainian soldiers and attacking/invading Russian paratroopers under Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Brand new Antonov AN-225 Mriya at the 1987 Farnborough Air Show
The corpse of the Antonov AN-225 at Antonov Airport in Hostomel on February 27, 2022.
On the advice of NATO it was prepared for evacuation, scheduled for the morning of 24th of February last year, but on that day Russia invaded, with the airfield being one of their first targets. A ban on civilian flights was quickly enacted by Ukrainian authorities. During the ensuing Battle of the Antonov Airport, the runway was rendered completely unusable.
The battle requires its own blog to delve into but suffice it to say, on the 27th of February, a press release by Ukroboronprom, Antonov’s parent organization, stated that the An-225 had been destroyed by Russian forces. Several other aircraft were in the same hangar as the An-225 at the time of its destruction, and were also destroyed or damaged during the battle; these include a Hungarian-registered Cessna 152, which was crushed by the An-225's left wingtip after the latter fell on top of it.
Ukroboronprom said that they planned to rebuild the plane at the Russians' expense. The statement said: "The restoration is estimated to take over 3 billion USD in 2022 dollars, and a duration of over five years. Our task is to ensure that these costs are covered by the Russian Federation, which has caused intentional damage to Ukraine's aviation and the air cargo sector." The Ukrainian government also said that it would be rebuilt at Russia’s expense.
On the 1st of March, 2022, a new photograph, taken since the initial conflict, was tentatively identified as the tail of the aircraft protruding from its hangar, suggesting that it remained at least partly intact, however, further evidence proved to show that the aircraft is inoperable due to the extreme damage it sustained. On the 3rd of March, a video circulated on social media, showing the aircraft burning inside the hangar alongside several Russian trucks, confirming its likely destruction. Nonetheless, Antonov stated again that until the aircraft is inspected by experts, its official status could not be fully known. On the 4th of March, footage on Russian state television Channel One showed the first clear ground images of the destroyed aircraft, with much of the front section missing. Following Russia's withdrawal from northern Ukraine, the second unfinished aircraft airframe was reported to be intact, despite Russian artillery strikes on the hangar housing it at the Antonov factory at Sviatoshyn Airfield.
