A night shot of the A380 model destined for Emirates advertising display at London Heathrow airport, being loaded on July 4th into the Antonov An-124 at Los Angeles, Ontario airport.
Photo courtesy of Dmitry Avdeev
The original story was at this earlier post
Two flights in a week earlier this month into the Netherlands for the An225. One into Amsterdam, Schipol and one into the Royal Dutch Airforce base at Eindhoven.
(photo reproduced with permission)
An opportunity for the photographers giving this nice shot by Dennis Muller showing the leading edge flaps deployed.
See the full page on the airplane including videos by clicking on An225.
Konstantin Lushakov, the executive director of Antonov Airlines, told reporters in Kiev on Wednesday that the joint NATO/EU contract for provision of stategic airlift jointly by Antonov and Volga Dnepr is to be extended by 2 years.
Lushakov said that all outstanding issues would be resolved by November and the participants in the project that unites 18 countries as users of the aircraft had become convinced of the high efficiency of the An-124-100.
He didn't rule out that the plane might continue to be in high demand in the NATO and EU countries in the next 10 years.
Originally signed in March 2006, the SALIS contract calls for one Antonov and one Volga Dnepr aircraft to be available at the base in Leipzig at all times with four additional aircraft available at short notice. In practice up to three Ukrainian and two Russian planes have been used to airlift cargoes to a range of destinations including Afghanistan, Chad and Rwanda. The intensity of airlifts constantly increases.
In 2007, Ukrainian planes flew 1,370 hours under the SALIS programme and earned about 15m euros.
The Antonov Airlines and the Russian company Volga-Dnepr set up a joint venture Ruslan-SALIS on a parity basis in Germany in 2004 to implement the SALIS contract using An-124 aircraft contributed equally by the two companies.
More background on the Ukrainian view can be found in this earlier post.
The Indian Air Force 'Sarang' helicopter display team of five ALH Dhruv helicopters displayed first at ILA and then at the Farnborough Air Show and reported on in the earlier post are on their way back to India courtesy of two An-124-100 flights.
The Dhruv helicopters are indigenous to India and were undertaking a 65 day tour in which they make 25 displays and were judged 'Best Looking Close Formation Team' at the ILA exhibition. (not sure if that was the display or the pilots! Ed.)
Picking up their loads in Farnborough and then dropping in to Stansted for a long runway allowing for max fuel one of the aircraft is pictured here on the evening of 23rd July.
Credit to Flightboy at the JustFlight forum for the image.
The latest ESA research satellite is lining up for launch from Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome on September 10th. First transport from the assembly site in the Netherlands will be by Antonov An-124 on 29th July before being transferred to rail for the journey to Plesetsk.
The launch of the satellite, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), was earlier delayed due to a problem with the Russian Proton launcher which led to a delay in the launch date and the necessity to reconfigure the satellite into a summer launch configuration.
The GOCE satellite has been developed to increase our level of understanding of the Earth's gravity field. The main instrument being carried for this purpose is an Electrostatic Gravity Gradiometer (EGG).
It is expected that GOCE will be in orbit for at least 20 months. The data it collects on the gravity field during its voyage are crucial for developing accurate measurements of ocean circulation and sea-level change, both of which are affected by climate change as well as helping understand more about processes occurring inside the Earth.
The GOCE satellite will leave Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands and be flown to Arkhangelsk, Russia thus adding to the roll call of space hardware carried by the Antonov An-124. The empty satellite container and specific ground support equipment will return to the Netherlands by a second An-124 flight on 19th September.
While the outsize cargo charter business with the An-124 continues to grow and provide great results for the participants including Volga Dnepr, the other side of VDA's business is not fairing so well.
From ATW
Tuesday July 22, 2008
Five-year-old AirBridge Cargo struggles with costs, finds profitability elusive
AirBridge Cargo, the scheduled 747F airline owned by Volga-Dnepr Group, said it likely will not achieve profitability this year despite a more-than-doubling of first-half 2008 revenue to $210 million from $96 million in the year-ago period.
The carrier was launched in 2003 with the primary aim of transporting cargo between Europe and Asia via Russia. "We still believe it's a successful business model," ABC Senior VP-Strategy and Commercial Denis Ilyin told ATWOnline at the Farnborough Airshow last week, blaming the lack of profitability on high costs, particularly for fuel and labor.
ABC operates a fleet of three 747-200Fs, one 747-300F and three 747-400Fs. It will take another -400F and retire a -200F by year end and has five 747-8Fs on order plus purchase rights for five more with first delivery slated for February 2010. "We will not grow in the next year as we would like to [owing to high costs]," Ilyin said. "We are thinking about stability rather than growth right now." He conceded that despite increasing traffic and revenue, "we are still struggling with bottom-line profit."
The carrier considers itself "to be the dominant player in the Russian market from both Europe and Asia." It operates flights from Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Luxemburg via Moscow Sheremetyevo and Krasnoyarsk to Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo Narita and Nagoya. It recently added limited service to/from Budapest but has put North American expansion plans on hold.
"North America should be a natural. . .in our network," Ilyin said. "But we have to give up growth for the sake of stability. Given the state of the US economy, we're not sure we'd be able to generate enough exports from the US to Europe and Russia to justify [expansion] right now."
He added that since fuel costs are not likely to lower significantly, ABC's decision to place orders for more efficient 747-400Fs and -8Fs will "lead us through" and enable long-term survival. "The cargo market created problems for itself," he commented. "It's been so attractive for everyone that the most lucrative markets [especially in Asia] have just been flooded with capacity. [If fuel costs remain at current levels], I expect the least efficient carriers to go away, which will keep carriers with good service in the strong markets."
by Aaron Karp
The airline business is a fickle and cyclical beast. AirBridge Cargo's difficulties may be coming principally from the oil and resulting aviation fuel price hike and its effects not only on aviation but also on the global economy. Similarly, much air charter work over the last 10-15 years has been in support of the military and one finds it hard to imagine similar levels of activity being sustained as that activity runs down, as we all hope that it will do, in the coming years.
So it may not be quite so rosy in the An-124 business either in the coming years.
