Tupolev Tu-404: the biggest airliner ever designed

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4 years ago

LARGEST AIRCRAFT EVER DESIGNED

Close your eyes and imagine the biggest passenger aircraft you can. Airbus A380, right?

Now triple its size, add Aeroflot livery, and there you have it. The Tupolev Tu-404, a stupendously large Russian project from the early 90s. Let’s take a closer look.

A lot can be said about the gargantuan airliner designs of the late 80s and early 90s.

They were based on the then-current trend of the growing hub-and-spoke model. The thinking was – there will be a lot of small airports and airliners ferrying people to large super-airports, connected by Jumbo Jets.

You cannot increase the number of planes taking off from a hub at the same time, so, in order to grow the flow of passengers, you have to increase the capacity of aircraft.

This thought as a business model was fundamentally flawed, and later got transformed to find not the largest, but an optimally sized airliner.

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The Antonov An-225 Mriya (Ukrainian: Антонов Ан-225 Мрія, lit. ‘dream’ or ‘inspiration’; NATO reporting name: Cossack) is a strategic airlift cargo aircraft that was designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet Union during the 1980s.

Number built‎: ‎1

First flight‎: ‎21 December 1988

Built by‎: ‎Antonov Serial Production Plant

National origin‎: ‎Soviet Union

The Antonov An-225 Mriya is a strategic airlift cargo aircraft that was designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet Union during the 1980s. It is powered by six turbofan engines and is the heaviest aircraft ever built, with a maximum takeoff weight of 640 tonnes.

LARGEST AIRCRAFT EVER DESIGNED

WATCH OTHER BIG JETS

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