Prague, May 10 (CTK) – Antonov An-225 Mriya, the world’s largest cargo plane, landed at Prague’s Vaclav Havel Airport yesterday in order to take a giant Czech-made electric generator to Australia.
The 117-tonnes-weighing generator has been produced by the Brush Sem engineering company in Plzen, west Bohemia, for an aluminium producer based in Australia.
“The generator will be transported from Plzen to Prague along the D5 motorway and then it will be transported to Perth, Australia, by plane,” Tomas Vycichl, from Brush Sem, has told CTK.
The Soviet-made An-225, which is 84 metres long with the wingspan of 88 metres, is the only plane of this type that has been completed.
It visited Prague several times in the past. For the first time, it was in 1989 when it was returning from a parade in Paris with the Buran space shuttle fixed to its fuselage. Its last visit was in 2006 when it was transporting turbines from Berlin to China.
The generator will be transported from Plzen to Prague during the night yesterday.
The loading of the giant machine is a complex technical task that could not be managed by Wednesday evening, and the An-225 must not take off at night due to its extreme noisiness.
That is why it is scheduled to leave Prague on Thursday.
Vycichl said the air transport of so large a product is exceptional, as devices of such dimensions are usually transported by water. However, the transport by ship would take about ten weeks, while the customer needs the generator as soon as possible.
