Martin JørgensenThe landing gear, a nightmare of hydraulics, contained 64 wheels arranged in four independent bogie trains. Turning required a specialized tow-tractor and a five-kilometer turning radius. The only operational anecdote comes from a purported "leak" by a former Antonov test engineer in a 2012 forum post, since deleted. He claimed that a single prototype—registration CCCP-990100—was rolled out of a modified hangar in Kyiv in December 1991, just weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union.
In the pantheon of aviation engineering, the Antonov Design Bureau is synonymous with "big." The An-225 Mriya —a six-engine, 32-wheel leviathan that carried the Soviet Buran space shuttle—remains the heaviest aircraft ever built. But in the dusty archives of unbuilt concepts, whispered about in the hangars of Hostomel Airport, lies a legend that makes the An-225 look like a crop duster: the Antonov An-990 .
The project was buried. The prototype, according to the tale, was disassembled and its parts absorbed into the construction of the second (never-completed) An-225. No aerodynamicist believes the An-990 could have flown economically—or safely. The torsional stress on the wing joints would have been catastrophic. The fuel consumption would have bankrupted a small nation. The engine-out scenario (losing one of 14) would require a flight computer more advanced than anything in the 1990s.
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.
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 . 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."