Customer Reviews

Antonov's Heavy Transports - Red Star Vol. 18

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One of the better books in the Red Star Aviation series, Antonov's Heavy Transports is a fascinating look at the Antonov OKB and its design for some of the world's most effective, and most elegant, heavy transport aircraft.

The book, chock full of photographs, documents the first Antonov heavy lifter, the An-22, which made a smashing debut at the Paris Air Show. The quality and effectiveness of this design is evident in its longevity. Only now, almost 40 years after production began, is the An-22 being phased out. The AN-124 CONDOR heavy lift transport, built in response to the debut of the US C-5 Galaxy, was a masterpiece of Antonov design and function. Though used mostly as an oversize cargo carrier today rather than in Russian Air Force service, it is the cargo carrier of choice for charter airlines like Volga-Dnepr and set over 100 world records for heavy tranports, broken only by the An-225. Even the American military has chartered the CONDOR to deliver supplies to the Middle East, Central Asia, and around the world. An offshoot of the CONDOR, the AN-225 MRIYA(Dream), NATO name COSSACK, is the world's largest airplane. With 6 turbofan jet engines and a split tail, the enormous MRIYA was a hit at every air show it attended, from La Borget to Farnborough. Utterly unique in its cargo carrying capabilites, it was designed by Antonov to transport the BURAN space shuttle. With the demise of the Soviet space program, the Mriya was refurbished and has become the plane of choice for tranporting oversized cargo of 150 tons or more.

The final plane is the An-70, a four engine turboprop heavy lift transport envisioned as a STOL competitor to the C-17 and replacement of the An-22. Gordon discusses its troubled history of joint Russian/Ukrainian financing and 2 prototype crashes, which led the Russian Air Force to pull out from the project. The Ukrainian Air Force has now decided to fund at least 2 production aircraft to enable the An-70 to begin production and continue Antonov's transport legacy, and the aircraft is receiving considerable attention from countries like China, the Czech Republic, and Hungary as the transport of the future.

All of the Red Star series, and all aviation books by Gordon, utilize his wealth of Soviet and Russian design histories and photographs to bring the aviation enthusiast a complete and detailed look at the four major Antonov OKB transports. A must have for aviation buffs.

If you're into Russian transports, specifically the heavy lifters, this is a very good reference on the history of large Russian cargo planes. Very well written with plentiful photos, this book covers R&D as well as in depth history of each aircraft. The only reason I give this four stars instead of five is the lack of scale line drawings for model reference. Otherwise, I highly recommend this title.

I read this good book, here in Brazil. This book has an excellent text, excellent quality paper and for me books with big size, such as this, are better than normal size. This book also has more photos, than pages. In fact, almost all pages in this book have at least one photo. The text is to be read for anyone. I'm not an airspace engineer; I'm an agronomist. And didn't need to read any book or internet site to understand nothing of this good book.
Why I won't give five stars for this book? The photos are mainly black and white. Yes, there's more than twenty color photos in this book, but they are only in the last pages. In the text itself, I found just one very small mistake, on page 53, where the author wrote 1966, instead of 1986.
I was looking for a book to read about the Antonov giant aircrafts: An-22, An-124, An-225 and An-70 and I found this good book, with an excellent text. This book is to be read for anyone.