Kyiv: The largest aircraft in the world was destroyed today by Russian troops battling on an airfield near Kyiv, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said, as Moscow continued its assault on its neighbour during the fourth day of its invasion.
AN-225 ‘Mriya’ – meaning ‘Dream’ in Ukrainian – was manufactured by Ukrainian aeronautics company Antonov, and qualified as the world’s largest cargo aircraft, before it was reportedly burned at Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv due to Russian shelling.
The US contracted for this plane often because even our own mighty C5 could not compete.
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IIRC, the AN-225 was used to retrieve the US reconnaissance plane that the Chinese pilot Wang Wei hit and disabled.
I saw it in person at Aerospace America in OKC many years ago. It’s huge. In the air it looks like it’s going so slow (it’s not) that it should fall out of the sky. It was an impressive airplane. Leave it to Putin to destroy it.
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The day after my son returned from China, I made him drive out to MSP to look at this beast, which was ferrying oversized A/C equipment.
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President Zelenskyy remarked they may have destroyed “The Dream” but they will never destroy our (the Ukrainian) dream. God bless and keep these people!
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