The An-225 Mriya is the world’s largest cargo plane.



The jet, fresh from a 18-month overhaul, carried coronavirus medical supplies from China to Poland.

The aircraft landed at Warsaw International Airport to unload a hundred tons of medical supplies.

The world’s largest cargo aircraft—full of medical supplies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic—touched down in Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday. The aircraft lifted off the day before from China carrying personal protective equipment, including masks and medical testing equipment. The lift was reportedly the largest cargo shipment by air by volume, filling four fifths of the massive aircraft’s cavernous hold.

The An-225 unloading in Warsaw, Poland. TPG Getty Images

The American Journal of Transportation reports the aircraft departed from Tianjin China Airport on April 13th, stopping in Almaty Airport, Kazakhstan, for refueling and to allow the crew to rest. The aircraft:

“....was loaded with about 100 tonnes of medicines, tests for laboratory analysis, medical masks and other protective equipment, with a total load of about 1000 m3. In the history of aviation, this cargo volume has never been transported inside the cargo hold of the aircraft.”

According to Antonov Airlines , the operator of the An-225, the big jet has an internal cargo volume of 1,200 cubic meters, or 42,377 cubic feet. The An-225 is also capable of lifting a maximum 551,155 pounds, or 275 tons. Poland’s order of medical supplies from China weighs a total of 200 tons but is light enough it occupies significant volume, so the shipment is being split into two AN-225 flights of one hundred tons each.

Here’s a video of the An-225 landing at Warsaw International, as found online by The Aviationist.

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The An-225 was originally designed by the Soviet Union to transport the country’s Buran space shuttle, an upgrade from the superpower's VMT Atlant transport plane. The Buran never reached operational status, and after the dissolution of the USSR, the sole complete An-225 was transferred to Ukraine, where the aircraft was originally built. Mriya was the world’s largest aircraft until the recent completion of Scaled Composites’ Stratolaunch jet .

The Ukrainian aircraft is still the world's largest cargo aircraft with the largest cargo capacity, as Stratolaunch was designed to lift rockets and space planes to the upper atmosphere on external pylons. Mriya is larger than America’s largest cargo plane, the C-5M Super Galaxy , by a considerable margin. The plane has a wingspan of nearly 300 feet, so large that a 1/72 scale model of the Mriya is still nearly four feet across. The An-225 recently completed an 18 month upgrade period.

The An-225 was originally built to ferry the Soviet Buran space shuttle. aviation-images.com Getty Images

The An-225 joins other heavy airlifters around the world in flying medical missions related to the COVID-19 outbreak. Earlier this week, a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III flew three Americans out of Afghanistan diagnosed with the coronavirus. In March, another C-17 flew half a million test swabs from Italy to the United States. A Spanish Air Force A-400M Grizzly airlifter transported face masks from France to Spain, and Indonesia used its American-made C-130 transports to pick up medical equipment from China and ferry it back to Jakarta.



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