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The AN-225: How the Cold War created the world's largest airplane. The first powered plane flight, performed by the Wright Brothers over the windswept beach of North Carolina's Kitty Hawk in 1903, covered 120 feet. That historic flight would fit entirely in the cargo hold of the Antonov AN-225 Mriya, the world's biggest fully operational plane. Powered by six turbofan engines and with a wingspan almost the length of a football field, this gentle giant of the skies can carry bigger and heavier cargo than any other plane, and is unique in the world of aviation, as just one was ever built. A favorite of plane spotters around the world, the AN-225 attracts a crowd whenever it visits an airport during one of its rare -- and often spectacular -- heavy lift jobs. “It looks magnificent during takeoff and landing and it seems to slowly sail into the air, due to its huge size,“ said Ilya Grinberg, a Soviet aviation expert and a professor of engineering at Buffalo State University. “It can be easily photographed with any type of camera and it looks very impressive from any angle. I think it is indeed an engineering marvel,“ he said. Recently, the plane has been used in the Covid-19 relief effort to transport record loads of protective equipment. But its original mission was very different: born out of the Cold War, the AN-225 was designed to be part of the Soviet space program. A new era in space exploration began in April 1981, when the first Space Shuttle launched into orbit from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its large cargo bay was a design feature pushed by the Pentagon, which used the Shuttle in a handful of classified missions to send military satellites into orbit. The USSR perceived this capability as a threat, and wanted a vehicle that could do the same. The result was the Buran (“Blizzard“ in Russian), a Soviet Shuttle that looked remarkably like its American counterpart, down to the black and white paint job. But whether it was a straight up clone or simply informed by the laws of aerodynamics, the Buran -- along with its companion rocket, the Energiya -- came with a logistical problem: how to transport the spacecraft from manufacturing facilities around Moscow to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, 1,300 miles away in today's southern Kazakhstan, from which Soviet space missions departed. Rather than building a new freeway across rivers and mountains, Soviet engineers asked the Antonov Design Bureau in Kiev to create a new transporter plane capable of airlifting the shuttle and its rocket. It would also be used to haul the Buran back to Baikonur whenever it would land at a backup site rather than the Cosmodrome upon returning from orbit. Antonov based it around an existing model, the AN-124 Ruslan (meaning “Condor“), itself already a very large plane, bigger than the Boeing 747-400. The overall size was increased significantly, with the goal of doubling the cargo capacity. Among the visible upgrades were an extra pair of engines, bringing the total to six, and a longer landing gear, which increased the wheel count to a whopping 32. A new twin tail with an oversize vertical stabilizer was also added to allow the plane to carry the Buran on its back. The resulting behemoth, so large that it stuck out of its hangar during the inauguration ceremony, was christened the AN-225 Mriya. “Mriya is the Ukrainian word for 'dream.' It was the first soviet plane to be christened with a Ukrainian name,“ said Grinberg. The Antonov Design Bureau worked quickly to produce the finished plane in just three and a half years, but it still couldn't keep up with the development of the Buran, so an interim solution was chosen: adapting a fleet of old 3M-T bombers to carry the spacecraft unassembled. When the AN-225 was finally ready, it was history it couldn't catch up with: both the Buran and the AN-225 first flew in late 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which foreshadowed the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result, the Buran program was canceled after just one official mission, and the AN-225 ended up carrying the shuttle piggyback style in only about a dozen test flights. The duo stole the show when it made an appearance at the 1989 Paris Air Show, but its primary mission had vanished. An outlandish proposal to transform it into a flying hotel, with suites and swimming pools and space for 1,500 guests never turned into reality, and the AN-225 ended up in a hangar where it was stripped for parts and rusted away for seven years.
