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Is an aircraft of this size economical, or is it a fuel hog useful only for carrying huge single-piece cargos that smaller aircraft cannot? Is it useful, or is it sheer size-vanity?
Is an aircraft of this size economical, or is it a fuel hog useful only for carrying huge single-piece cargos that smaller aircraft cannot? Is it useful, or is it sheer size-vanity?
The author of that article answered all your questions. Take a few moments to read it.
You can infer something from phrases like "flying super heavy cargos" and "by bringing infrastructure ... that are normally too big for airlift" but it would be interesting to see if anyone has something to add directly on that topic as to what exactly the drawbacks to that scale are. The fact that only one was ever made also implies that the uses are limited.
"84 meters ... 88 meters ... 250 tons ... 300,000 lbs"
The US also operates a fleet of larger cargo planes than the one chosen for the comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy (I think the typical reader will have little intuition for the cargo capacity of the C-17, so the more instructive comparison looks at the most capable operational US plane.)
Is an aircraft of this size economical, or is it a fuel hog useful only for carrying huge single-piece cargos that smaller aircraft cannot? Is it useful, or is it sheer size-vanity?
If the plane were economical for general cargo lift they would have made more than one.
Is an aircraft of this size economical, or is it a fuel hog useful only for carrying huge single-piece cargos that smaller aircraft cannot? Is it useful, or is it sheer size-vanity?
The author of that article answered all your questions. Take a few moments to read it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author of that article answered all your questions. Take a few moments to read it.
Hm, the words "fuel" and "economic" do not occur in that article. You can infer something from phrases like "flying super heavy cargos" and "by bringing infrastructure ... that are normally too big for airlift" but it would be interesting to see if anyone has something to add directly on that topic as to what exactly the drawbacks to that scale are. The fact that only one was ever made also implies that the uses are…
So by those rough guesses, the AN-225 should be ok.
That said, the moment you have a too heavy, or too big load for an AN-124, then the extra fuel cost of the AN-225 has almost infinite value.
The drawbacks to scale always have to do with complexity, and ground infrastructure. The AN-225 can't operate from as wide a variety of fields that the AN-124 can (though this shouldn't be a huge concern from commercial use).
Structurally, the modifications from the AN-124 to AN-225 aren't super complex. They basically added plugs before and after the wings to extend the fuselage, and added a wing extension. While these aren't trivial changes to an aircraft, they're basically the simplest type of structural change you can make. Oh, I guess there's a tail modification, but that's not that risky either.
I mean I guess the point is that you probaly would not want a whole-scale replacement of AN-124 class lifters with AN-225, but keeping a few around enables entire types of lifts (and therefore operations) that simply aren't possible. The key would be to estimate what the appropriate amount of AN-225 are.
For an example, the famous Beluga Airbus enables a form of manufacturing distribution (for good or for bad) that simply isn't possible without it existing. You would never want a giant fleet of Beluga, but having it is invaluable.
Is an aircraft of this size economical, or is it a fuel hog useful only for carrying huge single-piece cargos that smaller aircraft cannot? Is it useful, or is it sheer size-vanity?
I expect this is desired for a few reasons - heavy military airlift, to match what the US has had since Vietnam with the C-5 Galaxy. Access to licensed construction of the D-18 engine (as mentioned by ovi256). And ego.
It's obvious to me that China doesn't care that much about the AN-225 design as for the design of the D-18 turbofan. They still can't design or manufacture a heavy turbofan domestically. This has seriously hampered their heavy airlift project (the Y-20, who first flew using Soviet-designed low-bypass 12-ton thrust D-30 fans, which killed its range). The domestic WS-20 turbofan design that was supposed to power the pr…
So this was originally made to carry the USSR's Buran space-shuttle-like project. I'd never heard of Buran before, but I have heard many critiques of the US's space shuttle program. Yet Buran looks almost identical from a cursory view. Why would the Soviet's independently develop a highly flawed project? This article does a decent job answering that: http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a9763/did-the-...
It's rammed with fantastic photos by Ralph Mirebs of the hangers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome used to house it (complete with an ageing, abandoned Buran inside).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US also operates a fleet of larger cargo planes than the one chosen for the comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy (I think the typical reader will have little intuition for the cargo capacity of the C-17, so the more instructive comparison looks at the most capable operational US plane.)
The comparison to the C-17 rather than the C-5 seems rather deliberate to me (along with using lbs instead of tons for the unit). It's more sensational if a future Chinese military cargo plane "beats" a US cargo plane in cargo capacity by XXX,000 of anything.
Also note that (according to Wikipedia) the capacity is 250,000kg - so 275 tons, or 551,155 lbs.
The C-17's cargo capacity (again, from Wikipedia) is 77,500kg - so 85 tons, or 170,858lbs. That looks a lot more like a difference of 380,000lbs than 300,000lbs to me, which, with some journalistic licence, could surely become "almost 400,000lbs more". You may well be correct about the sensationalism aspect, and here they are leaving some of that on the table.
So I don't really know what's going on. Like I said, functionally innumerate... (Though of course, calculation error at this end is always a possibility! But nobody's paying me to do this, so I'm going to go with my gut here.)