The Antonov An-225 Mriya was the heaviest aircraft ever built and, for more than three decades, the largest plane flying. The video below shows it lifting off from Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany, reportedly in November 2016, in footage credited to Gerd Valdeig. Despite freezing weather and a delay of almost a full day, a large crowd waited along the airport fences to see it go.
Only one An-225 was ever completed, and it no longer exists: it was destroyed at its home airfield near Kyiv in February 2022. That makes footage like this a record of an aircraft nobody can watch fly again.
How big was the An-225?
The numbers explain why people queued in the cold. The An-225 was 84 metres long, with a wingspan of 88.4 metres, wider than a football pitch is long. Its maximum takeoff weight was 640 tonnes, which is why some older articles round it up to figures such as 710 tons; the commonly cited specification is 640 metric tonnes.
To get that mass off the ground it used six Progress D-18T turbofan engines, each producing about 229.5 kN of thrust, and a landing gear with 32 wheels spread along the fuselage. Only a couple of aircraft have had wider wings: Howard Hughes’s one-off H-4 Hercules flying boat of 1947 and, since 2019, the twin-fuselage Stratolaunch rocket carrier, both much lighter.
The name Mriya is Ukrainian for “dream”.
Why the Soviet Union built it
The An-225 was designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in Kyiv, then part of the Ukrainian SSR, during the 1980s. Its first job was to carry the Soviet space shuttle Buran and parts of the Energia rocket on its back, a role similar to the converted Boeing 747s NASA used for the Space Shuttle. That is why it has a twin tail: a single central fin would have sat in the turbulent air behind a shuttle mounted on top.
It first flew on 21 December 1988. When the Buran programme was cancelled after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the aircraft lost its purpose and spent much of the 1990s parked, with its six engines removed for use on Antonov’s smaller An-124 freighters.
A second life as a cargo plane
In the late 1990s Antonov decided to restore the Mriya for heavy commercial cargo work. It received its civil type certificate on 23 May 2001, and its first commercial flight, in January 2002, carried 216,000 ready meals for US military personnel in Oman. From then on it was flown by Antonov Airlines, registered as UR-82060, to move loads that no other aircraft could carry: power generators, mining trucks, wind turbine blades, disaster relief and, during the pandemic, medical supplies.
A second airframe was started in the late 1980s with a slightly different configuration, but work stopped after the Soviet Union broke up. It was reported to be about 60 to 70 percent complete by the mid-2010s, and a 2011 estimate put the cost of finishing it at around 300 million US dollars.
World records it set
The An-225 set about 240 world records. Among the best known:
- Heaviest single item flown: a generator for a gas power plant in Armenia, weighing 189,980 kg (about 418,830 lb) with its loading frame, in August 2009.
- Heaviest total payload: 253.82 tonnes (about 559,580 lb) on 11 September 2001.
- Heaviest commercial load: 247 tonnes (about 545,000 lb).
- Longest air cargo item: two wind turbine blades, each 42.1 metres long, flown from Tianjin, China, to Denmark in June 2010.
Its last commercial mission, in early February 2022, carried about 90 tonnes of COVID-19 test kits from Tianjin to Billund in Denmark.
What to watch for in the takeoff
A heavy jet’s departure is slower than many people expect. Watch how long the An-225 rolls along the runway before the nose lifts: with that much weight, it needs a long run to reach flying speed. The low, layered engine roar comes from six large turbofans working together, and the twin tail is easy to pick out from the side.
The airport buildings, service vehicles and the crowd also help with scale. A superlative like “largest plane in the world” is abstract, but the gap between the aircraft and everything around it makes the size obvious. Crowds like this one gathered wherever the Mriya landed, because a visit was always an event.
The destruction of the Mriya in 2022
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the An-225 was at Antonov Airport in Hostomel, just outside Kyiv. The airfield was among the first places attacked. On 27 February Ukraine’s state defence company Ukroboronprom announced that the aircraft had been destroyed, and later images showed its hangar wrecked, the forward fuselage burned and a wing broken.
Ukrainian officials and Antonov have spoken about building a replacement, possibly using the unfinished second airframe and parts recovered from the wreck, with cost estimates of several hundred million dollars. Whether and when that will happen is uncertain. The questions about why the aircraft was not moved abroad before the invasion also led to investigations in Ukraine.
For now, videos like this one are the closest anyone can get to seeing the Mriya in the air. The video is hosted on Rumble.
Sources: Antonov An-225 Mriya, Wikipedia; WPTV (Scripps), 28 February 2022; video: Rumble, footage credited to Gerd Valdeig.
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