Antonov An-990 !new! Official

Where the An-225 had one fuselage, the . Two pressurized cargo holds ran parallel to a central passenger/crew module, all joined by a delta wing so vast its trailing edge was measured in hectares, not meters. To lift a projected payload of 990 metric tons (nearly triple the An-225's capacity), Antonov engineers reportedly opted for 14 engines —a mix of Progress D-18T turbofans on the wings and four reinforced Kuznetsov NK-32 afterburning turbofans (from the Tu-160 bomber) mounted on a revised tail fin for "assisted climb-out."

The taxi test was a disaster. The weight of the central fuselage caused the asphalt of the taxiway to liquefy. The first and only "hop"—a 20-foot rise off the runway at 180 knots—reportedly shattered every window in the control tower and stripped the roof off a nearby maintenance shed due to the exhaust wake of the 14 engines. The aircraft landed immediately, its rear triple-fuselage joint cracked. antonov an-990

Officially, the An-990 never existed. No technical manual, no wind tunnel model, no grainy black-and-white photograph has ever been authenticated. Yet, among post-Soviet aerospace engineers, it is a cautionary fable of "what if the constraints of physics were merely suggestions?" According to the lore, the An-990 was conceived in the late 1980s, a time of Soviet economic chaos but unchecked engineering ambition. The brief was simple: transport the heaviest components of the Soviet energy and space sectors—whole nuclear reactor vessels, sections of oil rigs, and disassembled launch vehicles—without disassembly, overland, to the frozen ports of the Arctic. Where the An-225 had one fuselage, the