World’s biggest aeroplane An-225 “Mriya” (Ukrainian: Антонов Ан-225 Мрія, lit. ‘dream’ NATO reporting name: Cossack) returned to sky according to the press service of the Antonov company.
The Antonov company started to repair and modernization of aircraft An-225 “Mriya” in 2018. March 25 after an 18-month outage, the plane took off from the airfield near Kyiv and held in the air for about 2 hours.
The aircraft was fitted with a new control system for the power plant as well as it is assumed that the An-225 received a new power plant from the Ukrainian “Ivchenko-Progress.”
Today An-225 Mriya is the largest transport aircraft in the world. Equipped with six turbojet engines, it is capable of lifting to 250 tons of cargo. The first flight of the aircraft was completed in 1988. In July 2019 the company “Antonov” stated that it intends to complete the construction of the second aircraft An-225, which began in 1989 and lasted until 1994.
The Antonov An-225 Mriya is a strategic airlift cargo aircraft that was designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet Union during the 1980s. The An-225, initially developed for the task of transporting the Buran spaceplane, was an enlargement of the successful Antonov An-124. The first and only An-225 was completed in 1988. After successfully fulfilling its Soviet military missions, it was mothballed for eight years. It was then refurbished and re-introduced and is in commercial operation with Antonov Airlines carrying oversized payloads. The airlifter holds the absolute world records for an airlifted single-item payload of 189,980 kilograms
