![]() Of the two AN-225 aircraft to begin construction, only one was completed before the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Similar in use but much larger than the modified Boeing 747 jetliners that served as NASA's two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, the AN-225 carried the winged spacecraft piggyback. The history of the AN-225, with its 290-foot-long (88.4 m) wingspan, dates back to 1985, when it was built to replace and augment smaller aircraft for the purpose of delivering Energia rocket boosters and Buran-class space shuttle orbiters to their launch site. ![]() Our task is to ensure that these costs are covered by the Russian Federation, which caused intentional damage to Ukrainian aviation and the air cargo sector," the corporation's officials said. "It is estimated that this will take more than $3 billion and more than five years. "The occupiers destroyed the plane, but they will not be able to destroy our common dream. "Russia has targeted Mriya as a symbol of the capabilities of Ukrainian aviation," the statement read. Ukroboronprom, the state-owned defense corporation under which the Antonov Company operates, declared the AN-225 lost in a statement posted to its website on Sunday afternoon. Aircraft enthusiasts shared marked up versions of the image, labeling what could be the Mriya's engines protruding out from the hangar. Later, Radio Liberty circulated on social media a photo, possibly taken by a drone, showing a fire rising from a hangar that appeared to match the known location of the AN-225. "Hostomel airport now under Russian airborn forces," wrote Dmitry Antonov. The chief pilot for Antonov Airlines, the air transportation division of the Antonov Company, confirmed the attack but said that the aircraft was still intact in a post he made on Facebook that same day. The news followed a string of unconfirmed reports that the Mriya had come under fire by Russian helicopters in an attack against the airport on Friday. "Currently, until the AN-225 has been inspected by experts, we cannot report on the technical condition of the aircraft," the company wrote. The Antonov Company, which since 2001 has operated the AN-225 as a heavy-lift cargo freighter, also took to Twitter to say it could not confirm the aircraft's status. "The biggest plane in the world, "Mriya" (The Dream), was destroyed by Russian occupants on an airfield near Kyiv," the official Twitter account for the country of Ukraine reported on Sunday. 24).įour days later, the news came that the one-of-a-kind aircraft was no more. Once the world's largest flying machine by both wingspan and weight, the Antonov An-225 "Mriya" ("Dream") was parked in an open air hangar undergoing repairs at Hostomel (or Gostomel) airport, located to the northwest of Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv, when Russia launched its attack against the country on Thursday (Feb. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has destroyed a "large" part of its own space history, with reports now confirming the fate of an enormous aircraft that was originally built to transport Soviet space shuttles. ![]()
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