Antonovs in America (2012)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/antonov-an-225-largest-pl...
I guess we can hope that after this war someone will put in the money to get the second airframe out of storage and get it finished. I'd assume the demand is there.
In Ukrainian news they say that they would force Russia to pay for restoring of the "Mria". Ukrainians are really berserks right now. No way to stop. Beside official army the civil population is getting involved more and more. Prepared millions of Molotov cocktails, and there have already been some Russian armor destroyed by it, and territorial defense units hunt down Russian advanced saboteur/spies teams and the likes and those Russian dispersed armor carriers and tanks. They joke that after seeing how they are beating Putin the NATO will be joining Ukraine instead of the other way around. While Russian tanks still continue coming, and massive Russian marines attack seems to be coming to Odessa, and Belarus forces are joining (btw that seems to me a sign of Putin's desperation as hitting Odessa would be as bad or even worse for Russian morale than hitting Kiev, and Belarus was probably kept as reserve) - it is pretty clear that they are coming to be blood bathed, and Ukrainians tell Russian soldiers to carry sunflower seeds in the pockets so at least sunflowers will grow when the soldiers die on Ukrainian land.
https://simpleflying.com/second-an-225-economically-unviable...
Fighting continued (it's in a hotly contested airport just north of Kyiv), and then yesterday the company released another update that said:
> Currently, until the AN-225 has been inspected by experts, we cannot report on the technical condition of the aircraft.
https://twitter.com/AntonovCompany/status/149796783633704140...
Based on that, I wouldn't call it completely destroyed, but it will certainly need repairing.
Not sure if that would be fun, or terrifying.
Having a hard time finding the source, but another anecdotal report claims they would fly into a headwind, then repel down.
As part of East German pre-military training of the youth I chose the paratrooper path in the GST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_Sport_un...).
The skydiving training airplane was the AN-2 of the article. Most memorable were the group jumps, 12 people leaving the AN-2 one after another as quickly as possible.
Image taken from that Wikipedia link, it looked pretty much like this and I was on that same airfield: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Fotothek... -- except that in this picture everybody is in civilian clothing but We were all in dark gray-green GST uniform.
I made 18 jumps. We first had to learn how to pack both parachutes, the main one and the reserve. It was done in steps, each of which had to be approved by a trainer. I still think it was good to pack your own chute. The first 12 jumps were quite diverse and the core of the training. For example, one jump (the fourth?) involved also opening the reserve in addition to the already open main (looked like this but in dark green: https://kameradenkreis-fjb-lstr40.de/wp-content/gallery/flug...). This was for when there was a problem with a not completely open main.
I remember that the only tree on the wide grass plain was almost hit by quite a few people quite a lot - for no good reason, since even though the round chute was not nearly as steerable as a as the modern wing forms it still was plenty good enough to easily avoid any such obstacles. I think it was because the brain involuntarily steers where people are looking, so those people trying too hard not to hit the tree might have involuntarily steered towards it, not sure, just my hypothesis because it made no sense. Or the guy who ended up with a sprained ankle in the only ditch far and wide.
The training involved training camps lead by military paratroopers in their third year. I remember I blacked out during one morning exercise. Discipline was harsh, real military style including group punishments when someone did something stupid and they could not determine who was responsible.
Just to finish the anecdote, the GDR ceased to exist before it was time to join the military, so I ended up in the now unified Bundeswehr as battle tank weapons systems mechanic instead of in a strenuous paratrooper role.
This is actually called target fixation[1] and is part of why a helpful hint for a lot of new cyclists is to simply look where you want to go and don't overthink it.
This is how I teach my kids and they tend to do very well in traffic and on their traffic exams.
Little old ladies would cross the highway, just moving at a predictable constant velocity and traffic would flow around them. Everything was laminar.
As a former sport skydiver, the An-2 was definitely an upgrade to planes like C-182 or C-206. But compared to more common choices like C-208, DO-28 or Porter it was not as good from speed/altitude perspective. For both military and sport use cases, the An-28 was a great plane.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/13851/north-koreas-rec...
But yes, even school classes had a somewhat military organization. Serving in the military also had very high prestige and was well paid (for East Germany), and you got very good support when you left the military.
In school I learned to lockstep-march and shoot and how to tackle the obstacle course and how to use maps and compasses and to navigate in unknown terrain and even how to use gas masks long before I finally ended up in the Bundeswehr. During basic training in the Bundeswehr, when a handful of fresh recruits including myself went over the wall with no difficulties on our first attempt, the Major standing on the side watching everything commented "Oh, that must be our new recruits from the East" (we were drafted to a West German location, just a year after reunification).
Anyway, it has nothing to do with fascism except that they too took on the Prussian militaristic heritage. Militarism was a Prussian thing since before "Germany" was made - by Prussia and by force of arms.
Fifty years ago, the Brown Book: War criminals and Nazis in the Federal Republic—in government, business, administration, the army, the judiciary and science was published on July 2, 1965.
In its first edition, the Brown Book listed the SS ranks and former Nazi membership of 1,800 business leaders, politicians and senior officials of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the third edition in 1968, more than 2,300 individuals were listed—including 15 ministers and state secretaries, 100 generals and admirals of the Bundeswehr, 828 judges, state prosecutors and top judicial officers, 245 leading officials of the foreign office, and 297 senior police officers and employees of the intelligence service. The veracity of the data was supported with detailed statements and quotations from legal, military and Gestapo archives, often accompanied by copies of incriminating documents.
“The whole system is infested with Nazis,” said publisher Albert Norden at an international press conference at the time. The Brown Book sparked a deep political crisis and led to the resignations of numerous officials and government ministers.
It played an important role in the protest movement of the 1960s. Suddenly it became clear that there had never been a “zero hour”—that is, a new beginning for German society after the end of World War II, as announced by the government of Konrad Adenauer. Despite adoption of the Basic Law (German constitution) and the official denazification campaign, key positions in the state apparatus, the government and posts for its representatives abroad were occupied chiefly by former Nazis.
The Brown Book set the ball rolling. After 1965, many more former Nazi perpetrators were unmasked in the German civil service. One thinks of the Baden-Württemberg Minister President Hans Filbinger, who served as a naval judge until the final days of the war, delivering death sentences that were only revealed in 1978
I saw a documentary on the RAF, I had no idea that West Germany had so many open Nazi party members in all levels of government. Esp former Gestapo members in leadership positions within the German Federal Police.
Is it threshing machine.. Is it Ju-52.. No.. it is the bloody Antonov.