The Antonov AN -225 at Hyderabad airport. (Pic received from aviation sources, photo credit unknown.)

Vijay Mohan

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 13

The world’s largest aircraft, Antonov AN -225 Mriya (the Dream), made its first landing in India early on Friday morning at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, en route to Australia from Europe.The aircraft is making a technical halt at Hyderabad. It touched down at midnight and will stay here for 26 hours before departing for its next destination Kuala Lampur early on Friday morning.(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)“Hyderabad was chosen for the stopover as it is the only airport in India having the required infrastructure, strength and length of runway and taxi tracks and communication system to handle this aircraft. Another requirement was not to overfly the city, which has noise pollution implications,” Narinder Nath, Chief Operations Officer of Air Shagoon, the company handling the ground operations, told The Tribune. Ït took us 25 days to work out the technicalities and obtain landing permission from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and the airport management,” he added.The aircraft arrived from Turkman bashi in Central Asia and will proceed to Jakarta and is destined for Perth, with technical halts at three places. It is carrying a generator that weighs 133 tonnes along with a crew of 21 and a few other passengers. The total journey from its origin, The Prague to Perth involves a flying time of about 26 hours spread over three days. The aircraft has a endurance of eight hours with full load.The six-engined Mriya, which means dream in Russian, is the longest and heaviest airplane ever built, with a maximum takeoff weight of 640 tonnes. It was developed to transport the Soviet Braun space shuttle or other super-heavy and outsized cargo. Given its size, wing-span and engine wake, it can operate from a limited number of airports. Only one AN-225 was built in 1988 that served with the Soviet Air Force. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, it remained in storage for a few years and was later, after refurbishment, entered commercial service with the Antonov Airlines of Ukraine. The construction of a second airframe was started in the late 1980s, but it remains unfinished to date due to funding issues. The AN-225 can carry up to 250 tonnes of cargo as compared to 157 tonnes by the double-deck Airbus A–380, the largest passenger aircraft in service, or 80 tonnes by the Boeing C-17, the heaviest freighter operated by the Indian Air Force (IAF). In fact, the IAF has a close association with Mriya’s manufacturer, the Antonov Design Bureau, having operated sizable numbers of the AN-12 medium-lift aircraft and the AN-32 tactical transporter. While Soviet-origin aircraft such as the AN-12, AN-32, IL-76 and IL-78 have been the mainstay of the IAF’s logistic support fleet for the past few decades, Western aircraft such as the C-17 and C-130 have taken over a large chuck of this role. Western aircraft manufacturers are also strong contenders for the IAF’s medium transport aircraft and midair refueling aircraft requirements. The IAF has operated Western transport aircraft in the past, with the Dakota, Caribou, Packet, Otter, Constellation, Avro, Devox and Flying Boxcar prominent among them.