Antonov

As of October 2026 – On the apron at Leipzig/Halle, the nose of a cargo aircraft swings upward, the nose gear lowers, and a complete helicopter rolls out of the fuselage. Once you have seen that live, you don’t forget it. The aircraft is an An-124 Ruslan, and it comes from a company that, like hardly any other, stands for heavy loads: Antonov. In eight decades, the Kyiv design bureau has designed biplanes, turboprops, regional jets and the largest cargo aircraft of their time – and today it works under conditions that no other aircraft manufacturer has to imagine.

From a secret bureau in Siberia to Kyiv

The story begins shortly after World War II. On May 31, 1946, a new Soviet design bureau with the sober designation OKB-153 was created at the aircraft plant in Novosibirsk. It was headed by Oleg Antonov, an engineer who had previously made a name for himself mainly with gliders. His first big project was a robust multipurpose biplane for agriculture, transport and remote regions: the An-2, which first flew on August 31, 1947.

In 1952, the bureau moved to Kyiv, and it has stayed there ever since. Over the following decades the name changed several times – at times it operated under cover designations, later as a scientific-technical complex with the abbreviation ASTC, today simply as Antonov Company. After the founder’s death in 1984, the bureau officially bore his name; Petro Balabuyev took over leadership of the design work.

Important for understanding: in Soviet times, Antonov was first and foremost a design bureau. Many of its types were not built in Kyiv but in plants across the Soviet Union, such as in Irkutsk, Voronezh, Tashkent or Ulyanovsk. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bureau and the Kyiv plant ended up in independent Ukraine, but part of the production and many suppliers in Russia. This entanglement shapes the company’s history to this day.

The types at a glance

The Antonov portfolio is large, but it follows a clear line: transport aircraft that work even on poor runways, often as high-wing aircraft with a rear ramp. Regional aircraft for passengers add to that. For you as a spotter, the table is a cheat sheet – the detailed recognition features are on the individual type pages.

By far the largest share of total production belongs to the An-2. More than 18,000 were built, a large part of them under license in Poland. The many turboprops of the An-24, An-26 and An-12 families each come to well over a thousand. The two giants, by contrast, are small series: a good 50 An-124s were built, and exactly one An-225.

The An-124 Ruslan: the workhorse for oversize cargo

When people talk about Antonov today, most mean the An-124. The four-engine freighter first flew in December 1982 and was then the heaviest aircraft in the world. It appeared in the West at the 1985 Paris Air Show. It was built in Kyiv and in Russian Ulyanovsk; in the civil version An-124-100 it carries up to 120 tons, and in the modernized version An-124-100M-150 up to 150 tons.

What makes the aircraft unique is not only its size but its independence from the ground. The nose section swings upward, there is a loading ramp at the rear, the landing gear can kneel so vehicles can roll in flat, and onboard cranes run along the ceiling of the cargo hold. That allows turbines, generators, helicopters, yachts or rotor blades to be loaded even where no heavy equipment is available.

For spotters, the An-124 is easy to identify: a high-wing aircraft with clearly drooping wings, four engines without winglets, a conventional tail with a low-set horizontal stabilizer and a long row of landing gear legs under the fuselage. You are most likely to confuse it with the American C-5 Galaxy from Lockheed, which, however, has a T-tail.

The An-225 Mriya: a one-of-a-kind and its end

The An-225 Mriya – Ukrainian for “dream” – was originally not even intended as a cargo aircraft for customers. Antonov developed it from the An-124 to carry the Soviet space shuttle Buran and parts of the Energia rocket on its back. For this it received a lengthened fuselage, six engines and a twin tail so that the load on the fuselage would not shadow the tail. It first flew on December 21, 1988.

The space program ended shortly afterward, and the Mriya stood unused in Kyiv for years. Only after a refit around the turn of the millennium did it enter commercial service with Antonov Airlines. On September 11, 2001, it took off with more than 253 metric tons of cargo; in 2009, with a generator weighing almost 190 metric tons, it carried the heaviest single piece ever transported by air freight. With its wingspan of 88.4 meters, it remained the largest aircraft in regular cargo service to the end.

Every Mriya landing was a public festival. Wherever it appeared, thousands stood at the fence. That ended abruptly: at the end of February 2022, the only completed An-225 was at the plant airport Hostomel northwest of Kyiv for maintenance when Russian troops attacked the airfield. It was destroyed in the fighting, along with other Antonov aircraft.

If you never saw the Mriya, you can now only find it in photo archives and memories. How it compares with other giants is shown in the article The largest aircraft in the world.

Antonov Airlines: cargo that fits nowhere else

In 1989, Antonov founded its own cargo division to market the An-124 internationally: Antonov Airlines. It flies under the ICAO code ADB and the callsign ANTONOV BUREAU – a good search term in flight tracking. The business model is pure charter: a customer needs a gas turbine in South America, a satellite has to get to the launch site or relief supplies to a disaster area, and Antonov Airlines sends the right aircraft.

For a long time, the airline also worked with the Russian Volga-Dnepr Airlines, which also operates An-124s; from 2006, the two marketed their fleets through the joint venture Ruslan International. This partnership is long history. Since 2022, Russian An-124s have disappeared from European airspace because of sanctions, so in Europe you practically only see the Ukrainian aircraft.

After the attack on Hostomel, Antonov Airlines relocated its flight operations to Leipzig/Halle. From there, the fleet sets off on missions around the world. According to available data, it comprises around seven An-124s in the -100 and -100M versions; older Antonov types hardly play a role anymore in the airline’s charter business. The exact number may change through overhauls and modernizations.

SALIS: NATO cargo from Leipzig

Leipzig is no coincidence for Antonov. An-124s have stood ready there since 2006 as part of SALIS (Strategic Airlift International Solution). Through the program, NATO and EU states charter large cargo aircraft for military transport – such as vehicles, helicopters or equipment for operations. At first the aircraft came via a joint venture with Volga-Dnepr; since 2019, SALIS has run through Antonov Logistics SALIS GmbH, a joint venture of Antonov Airlines and the Leipzig freight agent Aircargonet. A new five-year contract was signed at the end of 2021. SALIS was originally meant as a stopgap until the European Airbus A400M is available in sufficient numbers – for the truly large loads, however, the An-124 remains indispensable to this day.

How to set up alerts for specific types and registrations is shown in the article Setting up notifications for aircraft. Everything about the location is in the spot guide to the observation deck at Leipzig/Halle Airport and in the article Plane spotting at Leipzig/Halle.

Antonov at war: production under pressure

The problems did not begin in 2022. The newer types – the regional jet An-148 and its stretched version An-158, the transport aircraft An-178 – depended heavily on components from Russia, and a large part of the An-148 was built in Voronezh. When relations worsened after 2014, this supply chain collapsed. Deliveries shrank to a few aircraft per year and then largely came to a standstill.

Organizationally, Antonov was placed under the state group Ukroboronprom in 2015, which bundles Ukraine’s defense and aviation industry. At the same time, the company sought new partners in the West and in Asia, for example for modernizations and the replacement of Russian parts. The An-132D demonstrator, a further development of the An-32 with Western engines, first flew in 2017 but did not go into series production.

With the Russian full-scale attack in February 2022, the situation worsened dramatically. Hostomel, the company’s plant and cargo airport, was one of the first targets. Besides the Mriya, other aircraft were destroyed or damaged there, including an An-26 and an An-74. Since then, Antonov has worked under wartime conditions. A visible sign that operations continue: in July 2025, an An-124 modernized in Hostomel was flown out from there.

How to recognize Antonov aircraft

Many Antonov types share a design language you recognize immediately after a few sightings: high wing, upswept tail with ramp, robust landing gear in side fairings. The differences lie in the number of engines, the type of propulsion and the tail.

You find many of these types in Europe mainly with militaries, cargo companies from Eastern Europe or at air shows. A broader look at Soviet designs is provided by the article Soviet airliners, and the difference from Western freighters is covered in Identifying cargo aircraft and Identifying military transports.

Where to see Antonov aircraft

The good news: you don’t have to travel far for an An-124. The less good news: its appearances can only be planned to a limited extent.

One type has become especially hard to find: Antonov turboprops in European scheduled service. If you want to see them, you have to travel to regions where the robust aircraft are still an everyday sight. Tips on how to track down such rarities are collected in the article Spotting rare aircraft.

Antonov compared

Antonov plays in a different league than Airbus or Boeing. The two Western groups live off large-series production for passenger airlines, whereas Antonov was always a specialist in transport aircraft and special solutions. Historically closest to it is the Russian aviation industry, which is now bundled in the United Aircraft Corporation and includes brands such as Ilyushin and Tupolev.

There is also competition among heavy-lift freighters: Airbus flies its own aircraft parts between its plants with the Beluga XL, and Boeing uses the 747 Dreamlifter for this. Both, however, are in-house transport for very light, bulky components. For truly heavy single pieces, there is hardly an alternative to the An-124 on the civil market – an important exception is the C-5 Galaxy, which flies only with the US military.

A side note connects Antonov with China: according to widespread reports, the Kyiv bureau designed the wing of the ARJ21 regional jet from COMAC.

Conclusion

Antonov is more than an aircraft manufacturer – it is a piece of aviation history that is still in the air today. From the An-2, which has flown for almost eighty years, through the turboprops that supply entire regions, to the An-124, the Kyiv bureau has created aircraft that work exactly where others give up. The loss of the Mriya and the consequences of the war have hit the company hard, but the An-124 keeps flying – and for spotters in Germany, closer than ever.

If you want to see Antonov, look to Leipzig/Halle, keep an eye on flight tracking and be ready to set off at short notice. The reward is one of the most impressive spectacles a cargo airport has to offer.