An-22 - Antey, who is not afraid of heights

It was the fifth day of the exposition in Le Bourget when visitors were informed that the arrival of a "very large airplane" from the Soviet Union was expected. The case was in 1965, and something larger in aviation than the C-130 Hercules could not be imagined by anyone.

Correspondents besieged Oleg Konstantinovich Antonov with the same question: "Does the USSR have a plane capable of lifting four hundred people in the air?" He calmly replied that he did not. Then the General laughed at the inadequacy of the representatives of the Western press: "They had to ask, but do we have a large airplane!"

And now this giant appeared in the sky. It fell to a height of five hundred meters, which was a violation of the rules established at the international air show. The sighs of the audience were drowned in the ringing roar produced by eight huge propellers with a diameter of more than 6 m. Having completed the maneuver, the An-22, which was he, turned and again passed over the stands, this time even lower, only three hundred meters from the ground. Now visitors could estimate its dimensions: the wing span exceeded 64 meters, and the length - 57 meters.

During the presentation of the new transport aircraft inside his spacious cargo salon, questions were again poured: "What is the purpose of this miracle of technology?", "Is it created for war?" Antonov replied that the bottle for the sieve was created for peaceful purposes, but when the war broke out, it was filled with a combustible mixture, and it became a weapon - and its An-22 "Antey" is a dual-use product.

In fact, the plane was conceived as a military aircraft. Its task was to quickly relocate the launch complexes of intercontinental strategic missiles. By the beginning of the sixties, the Antonov design bureau had already established itself as a team capable of creating unsurpassed samples of transport aircraft, so the Ministry of Defense had no questions with the executors of the order.

During the design and testing of the An-22, the tail feathers and chassis racks were the most difficult. In order to solve the problem of flutter, that is, vibrations that destroy the design of the airplane at a certain speed, we had to move the elements of the vertical tail several times forward. As for the main racks, the requirements for them were high. Takeoff weight of two hundred and twenty tons - the load is solid, so the number of pneumatics was brought to twelve, not counting the bow, with their truly titanic dimensions - in human growth.

It is possible to enumerate the world records set on the An-22 for a long time, there were more than four dozen of them. For a long time he remained the world's largest cargo aircraft, having a fuselage with an internal diameter of six meters and the ability to lift a mass of cargo up to one hundred tons into the air. The speed with which the flight passes is also impressive, it exceeds five hundred kilometers per hour. Sit down and take off this plane can, using a runway only a kilometer long. The range of non-stop flight is 5,200 kilometers.

Currently, 12 AN-22 aircraft are on service in Russian aviation. Photos of this powerful transport vehicle with recognizable signs of the Russian Air Force continually flash in news programs, and, in addition, Ukraine has one more.

The use of An-22 was also found in civilian life, they delivered cargo for the builders of oil pipelines, humanitarian aid to Peru during the earthquake of 1970, having overcome seventeen thousand kilometers.