There are big aircraft, and then there was the Mriya. Stand under a Boeing 747 and you feel small. Stand under an An-225 and the 747 starts to look like the small one. For 33 years exactly one of these machines existed — a six-engined Soviet giant built for a single, almost absurd job — and then, on a February morning in 2022, the world lost it in a matter of hours.

Its name was Mriya, Ukrainian for dream. It was, and remains, the largest and heaviest aircraft ever to fly.

Built to carry a spaceship

The An-225 did not begin as a cargo plane. It began as a piece of the Soviet space programme. In the 1980s the USSR was building Buran, its own reusable space shuttle, launched by the enormous Energia rocket. Both the orbiter and the rocket's components were too big to move by road or rail across a continent-sized country. The Soviets needed a flying transporter — their answer to NASA's modified Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier, only far larger.

Antonov's design bureau in Kyiv took its existing four-engined An-124 heavy lifter, stretched the fuselage, added two more engines for a total of six Ivchenko-Progress D-18T turbofans, fitted a new twin-tail so a shuttle could ride on its back without disturbing the airflow, and widened the wing to a span of 88.4 metres — wider than any operational aircraft before or since. The result rolled out and first flew on 21 December 1988. It rode on a landing gear of 32 wheels and could lift a maximum take-off weight of 640 tonnes.

A dream without a mission

The Mriya carried the Buran orbiter piggyback in 1989 and stole the show at the Paris Air Show that year. And then history moved faster than engineering. The Buran programme was cancelled, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the world's largest aircraft suddenly had nothing to carry. Through the 1990s it sat parked, its engines removed and used elsewhere, slowly gathering dust.

Its second act was more unlikely than its first. In 2000–2001 Antonov rebuilt and re-certified the aircraft for a new career as a commercial heavy-cargo hauler — the machine you could charter when a load was simply too big for anything else on Earth. Locomotives, generators, wind-turbine blades, entire industrial plants: the Mriya flew them. Along the way it set numerous FAI world records, including the heaviest single cargo item and a total airlifted payload of roughly 253 tonnes. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 it became a symbol of hope, ferrying vast loads of medical supplies between continents to headlines around the world.

The day the dream died

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the An-225 was in its hangar at Antonov Airport in Hostomel, on the northwestern edge of Kyiv — one of the very first targets of the assault. According to Ukraine's Ukroboronprom, one of the aircraft's engines had been dismantled for maintenance, and there was no time to fly the giant to safety. In the fighting over the airfield, the hangar was hit and the Mriya was destroyed. On 27 February 2022 Ukraine confirmed the loss; drone footage that emerged weeks later showed the forward fuselage burned out and the great wings broken.

A second airframe, roughly 60–70% complete, has stood unfinished in a workshop since the Soviet era. Antonov has spoken of finishing it to give the Mriya a successor, but the cost runs into the hundreds of millions and the war continues. For now, the world has zero flying An-225s — and, for the first time since 1988, no aircraft of its scale in the sky at all.

Why it still matters

The An-225 was a one-off born of a very specific Cold War need, and in strict engineering terms it was a dead end — no airline needs a 640-tonne aircraft, and its cargo niche was tiny. But almost no machine in aviation was more loved. Enthusiasts drove for hours to watch a single landing. It was the aircraft that made grown pilots pull out their phones. It proved, gloriously and impractically, just how big flight can be.

Its stablemate at the top of the size charts is the American C-5 Galaxy — the other giant of the airlift world, and still very much flying. But there was only ever one Mriya, and its name turned out to be the truest thing about it: it really was a dream.