Everybody who knows anything about the Antonov An-2 knows the same thing about it: that the flight manual has no stall speed, and that if the engine quits you simply hold the stick back and the aeroplane parachutes gently to earth at 40 km/h.

It is a wonderful story. It is on Reddit, in a thousand forum posts, in the Wikipedia article. It is also, as far as anyone has been able to establish, not true.

Which is a shame, because the real An-2 does not need the help.

A tractor with wings, and that was the point

The An-2 was not designed as a bush plane or a paratroop transport. It was built to a Soviet Ministry of Forestry requirement of the 1940s for an agricultural aircraft to replace the Polikarpov Po-2. Everything people admire about it — the short field performance, the enormous wing, the indestructible undercarriage, the ability to work from a field that has never seen a roller — follows from the job of spraying crops and getting in and out of places with no runway at all.

It is an aeroplane designed around the assumption that the infrastructure does not exist.

The stall-speed legend, and where it came from

The quotation that follows the An-2 everywhere reads roughly like this: that if the engine quits at night or in cloud, the pilot should pull the control column fully aft and keep the wings level, that the slats will snap out at about 64 km/h, and that the aircraft will then sink at about a parachute descent rate until it hits the ground.

It is presented as a translation from the manual. It is not one.

The passage first appears in the very first revision of the English Wikipedia article, in June 2004, added without any source — and it was written in imperial units. The metric figures everyone quotes are later back-conversions of an American editor’s prose. An actual Soviet flight manual contains nothing resembling it; its forced-landing procedure calls for touching down at 75–80 km/h.

The half that is true is this: Soviet manuals genuinely do not publish a stall speed for the An-2. But that is not because the aircraft cannot stall. Peter Garrison, writing in FLYING, gave the mundane explanation.

In other words the An-2 does not refuse to stall through some Soviet aerodynamic miracle. It simply cannot be pulled far enough. And the very low figures pilots report come from watching an airspeed indicator that is wildly inaccurate at high angles of attack.

Operators in the United States publish a stall speed of 35–40 knots — around 65–74 km/h. Slow, genuinely impressive for an aircraft this size, and about double the legend.

Two more claims worth retiring

The An-2 is often called the most-produced biplane in history. It is not. The Polikarpov Po-2 was built in numbers somewhere between 20,000 and 33,000. Antonov’s own website is careful about this, describing the An-2 as the most intensively manufactured biplane after the end of the Second World War, which is a defensible and much narrower claim.

The other is the production-run record. The An-2 was built from 1947 to 2002, which is remarkable by any standard, but Wikipedia’s own text concedes the record “has since been exceeded”. The Beechcraft Bonanza and Cessna 172 have both been in production longer.

The strangest chapter: Croatian bomber, 1991

The An-2’s combat record is thin and mostly odd, and one episode stands well clear of the rest.

In October 1991, with Vukovar under siege, a Croatian unit was formed at Osijek from the local aeroclub and a crop-dusting company. They flew An-2s at night to resupply the besieged city, and improvised bombs — domestic boilers packed with explosive, known as bojler bombe — which the crew rolled out of the cargo door by hand.

On 2 December 1991, shortly after six in the morning, one of the aircraft was hit by a surface-to-air missile near Vinkovci. All four men aboard were killed, among them the unit’s founder, Major Marko Živković.

Elsewhere the type has been used for special-forces infiltration by North Korea, which the Defense Intelligence Agency assesses operates more than 250 of them, and as unmanned decoys by Azerbaijan in 2020. The frequently repeated claim that it is radar-invisible because it is made of wood and fabric is wrong on the facts — the fuselage is all-metal. Flying low and slow explains far more than the materials do.

An An-2 demonstrating the short-field performance the type is actually famous for.

Still here, and being argued over

Production has genuinely ended everywhere. PZL Mielec built the last four for Vietnam in January 2002. About 249 remain in commercial operation worldwide, with several hundred more held by the Russian defence-sport organisation DOSAAF.

Replacing it has proved harder than expected. The turboprop TVS-2MS conversion, which fits a Honeywell engine, has managed 29 aircraft. The all-composite TVS-2DTS flew in 2018 and was rejected in 2019 for containing too many Western parts. The LMS-901 Baikal, the intended successor, was described by a Russian deputy prime minister in May 2025 as having reached a dead end, though it flew on a domestic engine that December.

In April 2026 a Russian institute proposed simply reactivating up to 700 stored An-2s at a cost several times their market value — which tells you something about how hard the aircraft is to replace.

You can fly in one, in Switzerland

If reading about it is not enough, the An-2 is one of the few Soviet classics you can simply buy a seat in. Our friends at goAviator operate sightseeing flights in an An-2 from Birrfeld, north-west of Zurich, with routes around the Rigi, the Mythen and the Säntis, plus a full-moon flight. Prices run from CHF 250 to CHF 350 and flight times from about an hour to an hour and a half.

Details and booking: AN-2 sightseeing flight from Birrfeld.

It will not parachute gently to earth at 40 km/h if the engine stops. It will, however, do very nearly everything else people say about it — and it will do it with a radial engine making a noise that no modern aeroplane can reproduce.

Takeoff and landing from inside the An-2 cockpit.

Sources: Antonov, Peter Garrison in FLYING, Wikipedia revision history, PZL Mielec, Kommersant via UNITED24, US Defense Intelligence Agency, Osijek County commemorative records