Antonov's AN-225 freighter aircraft, the largest commercial freighter in the world was last week unloading in Shijiazhuang, northern China
The aircraft was chartered by freight forwarder, Panalpina, to carry two laser welding machines with a combined weight of about 150 metric tons bound for Tangshan City, Hebei Province.
Antonov An-225 loading operations
The heavy lift cargo was loaded in Hamburg and discharged in Shijiazhuang on 10th April. The cargo was urgently required but was beyond the capacity of conventional Boeing freighters and ocean transport would have taken too long.
Panalpina is a regular user of Antonov's smaller An-124 aircraft so the Antonov An-225 was known to the forwarder’s charter and emergency department who promptly secured the AN-225 for the breakbulk cargo.
The An-225, operated by Ruslan International of which the owner, Antonov Design Bureau, is a partner, is the largest commercially used transport plane in the world. It is powered by six Lotarev D-18 engines. The plane has a wingspan of 88.4 meters and a cargo hold of 1,220 cubic meters.
Loading the machines required a purpose-built ramp and a 160-ton crane and took many hours. The aircraft stopped in Minsk and Novosibirsk before reaching Shijiazhuang in the Northern Chinese province of Hebei on April 10.
Following the charter, the People's Daily newspaper reported that Shijiazhuang City airport and Antonov were considering using the airport as a cargo transfer hub for distribution of cargoes throughout northern China. This is prompted by the increased saturation of the nearby Beijing international airport.
Outsized and very heavy cargoes destined for China could be carried by Antonov An-225 into Shijiazhuang, capital of north China's Hebei Province before being transported to other places in China an airport representative remarked.
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
There have been a flurry of press comment on the possibility of the Russian military ordering new An124 aircraft to kick start the production of new build aircraft.
The comment mostly seeming to come from UAC President and CEO Alexei Fyodorov as well as the head of the Russian Air Force. For an example see http://www.russiandefenseblog.org/?p=694
However, despite military aircraft and those of Rossiya being seen more frequently these days there is no mention of the maybe 40 aircraft that were in military service at the break up of the Soviet Union and subsequently mothballed. These must surely be more cost effective for the military to put back into service.
Although some of the current commercial An-124 fleet are new build since that time the majority date from that era and began their lives with very early modification states. So there is clearly no technical reason why they could not be upgraded to current standards.
It is also interesting to see Mr Fyodorov referring to the necessity for a military order before the whole program can begin. With a $200 million dollar price tag and a cruising speed some 10% less than conventional aircraft due to the fundamental aerodynamics of a ramp loading airplane it is difficult to see even an upgraded An-124 being competitive in operating economics with competing aircraft.
So we complete the circle and large scale civil aircraft production is again dependent on the military picking up the tab to kick start the program. A typical US approach yet state subsidy as argued by Airbus.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
After a lengthy refit and life extension program in Antonov Design Bureau's facilities in Kiev during the first part of this year the Antonov An-225 has claimed a new world record airlift out of Frankfurt Hahn Airport.
Antonov-225 in new livery. Click to Enlarge
Antonov Airlines’ An-225 'Mriya' is the only example of the heavy-lift freighter, the world’s largest operational aircraft with a maximum gross weight of 640 tonnes (1,411,000 lb) and payload of 250 tonnes.
The aircraft now sports a new livery featuring the blue and yellow national colours of Ukraine.
The world record lift was 16.2m (53ft)-long generator destined for a gas plant in Armenia. Following earlier extremely heavy loads which took rather longer to complete the loading methods and equipment have clearly improved considerably as the aircraft arrived in Hahn on 11 August and departed on the 12th before returning for a second large piece the following day making the carriage of such extraordinary pieces look routine.
The total cargo load totalled 190 tonnes including the loading frame with the generator weighing in 187.6t.
 An-225 World Record Lift |
 An-225 World Record Lift |
 An-225 World Record Lift |
So it seems that even Kieran Daley over at Flight Global has some spare minutes to trawl the web for relevant footage of the air cargo charter business and came up with this Youtube video taken from the flight deck of an Antonov An-124.
The camera wielding freight dog may be a romantic but looks like they are also a little outside their comfort zone in the video editing field.
Mosnews.com today reported that Russia intends to restart production of the An-124-100. It will be interesting to see whether this much talked of event comes to fruition.
The Aviastar-SP factory in Ulyanovsk, in Russia’s Volga region, will again begin making the An-124-100 aircraft, otherwise known as the Ruslan, Lenta.ru reports. It is the world’s largest commercial cargo plane and was the largest plane of any type in production until the An-225 took that title away from it.
The exact date for renewed production has not been announced, but the paperwork is now being done to include the project in the 2010 federal budget.
The move is likely to create more than 2300 new jobs at Aviastar-SP and generate 4 billion rubles ($125.4 million) of income per year for the government.
Only 56 Ruslans were ever made. The first one took to the skies in 1982. In April 2008, Viktor Zubkov, who was then prime minister, stated that production of the plane would be resumed in the third quarter of that year.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=31084f08-db9b-4aaf-aad4-531c25f93294)
2 x F/A-18 Mirabel to Australia
There was a time, not all that long ago, when moving fighter airplanes like the F/A-18 from one theatre to another or from manufacturer to customer was a major undertaking, especially when long overwater legs were concerned.
Those nations with transport aircraft large enough to accommodate them, (which reduced the list to the USA), were usually pretty hard pressed to make the capacity available especially when considering that the cargo itself had wings.
So the fighter boss had to content himself with either a long, slow trip by boat or the risk and substantial expense of long ferry sectors by his tempremental and very expensive asset.
The arrival of the An-124 in commercial guise after the break-up of the Soviet Union has been a godsend for military logisticians everywhere. The very possibility of western military interventions around the globe over the last 15 years being highly questionable without the availability of these aircraft for charter.
The latest example is the photo story carried on FlightGlobal's Image of the Day of 2 x F/A-18 aircraft being loaded at the L3 MAS facility at Mirabel for delivery to the Royal Australian Air Force by an An-124 of Antonov Airlines.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9dd7eb14-4c08-45bb-a2a4-1ace94d6c7dc)
