Monster Plane Touches Down In Perth, AU
eh-from the 80s. where or wehere is our new technology? anyway, still cool. would have gone to see it land if I lived in Perth and had the free time :)
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Most technical differences in terms of rate of climb, max altitude, etc., are very negligible in comparison. 1800 feet per minute for the C-5 compared to 1850 for the Antonov, etc. There are some areas where American engineering wiped the Russian's out though, particularly where war-fighting is concerned.
1.) The C-5 can kneel to the ground, bending its landing gear up like knees, eliminating the need for high-chassis cargo service and loading equipment. In practice, the Air Force just uses cargo equipment like the commercial industry would rather than stress the jet, but in a combat theatre, it can kneel itself down.
2.) The C-5 opens at both ends, can be flat for rolling stock (vehicles) or flipped-up roller bed, or a combination of the two for rolling stock and cargo. It also carries several hundred troops on the second deck in the passenger section as well as living quarters with a galley / dining area / beds for being aloft an indefinite period of time with in-air refueling and the ability to carry multiple aircrews. For fast loading/unloading, we would quite normally kneel the jet, and roll cargo off the front while taking on shipments going back at the same time from the rear. The C-5 cargo bay is also pressurized, I don't think the Antonov AN-225 is, for humanitarian evacuations, the C-5 cargo bay has rolling/lock-down PAX seating units that are two-tier with airline style seating stacked two-high. The jet can move thousands of people safely if it needs to. I say humanitarian purposes, because the US armed forces have never fled from the fight (at least not with a Republican president).
3.) Takeoff length is about the same, 8400 feet (C5) versus about 10,000 feet for the Anatov, but the C-5 has enormous thrust reversing - so much so, it can actually back itself up into a parking spot while loaded... which we did once in Addis Ababa Ethiopia when we blew some people's shanty houses over with the jet wash. The C-5 can land and stop in 3600 feet, versus the Anatov needing about 12,000 feet. You don't find many 12,000 foot runways in an improvised war zone staging area... it is things like that where a Cold War turning hot with the Soviets, and their tanks being diesel slugs versus US turbine-driven w/ laser-guided firing and shoot-on-the-run cannon leveling, that would have made enormous battlefield differences.
4.) The Anatov can carry twice as much payload, but it generally takes double the fuel, costs 4 times more to make & buy, and there are 100s of C-5s in the Air Force fleet, so we can just fly & land more times. The C-5M is now in production as well, delivering a completely modernized cockpit compared to that clunky old 1980's inertial navigation stuff.
Where it gets interesting with payload, is that unless you are hauling bricks or led, the max payload doesn't really matter much - that's just a function of how big of a pig of turbines you are using and it lengthens takeoff & landing.
For the practical mission, the C-5 is only about 20 feet shorter in cargo bed (120 vs 140) and 2 feet narrower, though has a higher cargo bay - closer to 20 feet versus 14.5. The C-5 has a couple of modified versions that were able to carry specialized space cargo and classified shipments to Area 51, so it could basically carry another aircraft, a space shuttle, or rocket components in the cargo bay.
From a practical standpoint, you wouldn't be able to put 2 tanks on the Anatov, it would be too heavy, so either of them could basically carry 1 battle tank, or about 6 school buses inside. The difference is how much luggage is behind the stuff.
Numbers... C-5s.. there are 131 of them with about 100 more C-5M's likely to be built. There is only a single Antonov AN-225.
Some years later I was sent to unit load masters school and learned the bureaucracy had caught up with us. Inspecting vehicles for loading we found any trucks with built up as an extra 'housing' on the cargo bed (mess galley's etc. had to have them removed, chains sawed or left behind. I measured out plenty of with for a small plane to fly through the cargo hold and heard someone with an ultra slow ultra lite was planning on doing it but never heard. Last comment the body is the major lifting surface the wings are there to tack on engines and get it up to body lift speed. An idea that goes back to WWII.
The Soviet army was built to wage a land battle in Europe, so the 'tank gap' and all the other crap the media liked to hype up was really just crap. We were not going to move 50,000 tanks across the Atlantic, what was there is all there would be. We would fight a retreating land battle until our air power achieved air supremacy (maybe a week or two) and then the A-10's and Apache Gunships would melt every Russian tank into the German farmland.
Our military was designed to be deployed virtually anywhere in the world, very rapidly, which is why we had and have hundreds of bases around the world. Most of those are nothing more than forward-deployed equipment depots.
Our strategy would never be to take on the North Korean 1 million-man army 1 to 1. We would never sign the ban on landmines for that reason, we've peppered the DMZ with them. We would again fight a in a standoff or defensive/retreating land battle until our air power arrived in numbers to wipe them out, on the remote chance the conflict didn't go nuclear.
The recent difference is Obama's reluctance to demonstrate that mobility. While the Cold War basically ended under Reagan, you have to wonder what was going through the minds of the Kremlin watching us enforce a no-fly zone over the Saudi/Iraqi border within days of their invasion of Kuwait and a buildup of 500,000 American combat troops within about 90 days half-way around the world. They would have never been able to project that kind of force, we always knew they could at most invade 500 to 700 miles into Europe beyond their Eastern Bloc before their supply lines were exhausted, or at least the ones that made it through the American air-to-ground interdiction.
The Iraqis had basically one of the largest armies in the world, and it was reduced to rubble while retreating.
It's a pretty simple question, if you were going to cross a South American jungle, would you want to start with something made by General Dynamics or Lockheed or General Motors, or some Russian piece of crap by Antonov. Which one would be able to pass up a gas station without stopping, or make it to the next gas station... how long would you wait for a water pump if you broke down between the options?
Even an alien craft from Area 51, eh?
;^)
Thanks for all the details, scojohnson. Cool!
He did tell me he would only know of the cargo they were carrying, when landing, they were required to black-out the cockpit windows with curtains and land with instruments-only. After landing, a black fabric tunnel was connected to the crew door and they would walk through the tunnel to a hangar with no windows where they would remain for several hours while the plane was offloaded and refueled. Then back out through the tunnel, into the blacked-out cockpit, and take off again. The runway was long enough that they could basically stop at mid-point by that security hangar, then take off in a straight-line again without ever taxiing.
There was no sign-in at a flight-ops, no travelers services of any kind for the aircrew, just some sodas, snacks, and a television with some basic TV service to keep them occupied.
Thanks again for the security details.
There was major congestion on roads as crowds drove to see it.
Yes it is 1980s technology with good design in getting that size to work. There are 21 crew. I expect they were all busy.
It carried a big 117-tonne generator from CzechRepublic for a smelter. There were 3 refueling stops- Turkmenistan, Hyderabad and Kuala Lumpur then the longest leg of 4067km trip from KL to Perth.
My opinion is that there is not a lot of business for that size of plane considering its cost, as FFA says there will be a lot more when costs come down, but technology is not there yet.
The Airbus A380 was a bust because while it could carry many more passengers than a boing 747 there just were not many flights that could fill the plane up.
This will have the same problem. Its also why the tech is from the 80ies, not much reason to research or design a larger plane as the market it not there. We can't really do much more in speed as supersonic cargo or personnel transports are frowned on by the "global warming" crowd.
So far it's still outselling and outperforming the competition because it has a much lower cost for transporting goods by the metric ton.
Bigger is not always better :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gi...
Thanks, kh!
To answer your question, cost of fuel and materials have dictated economic and safety limits on planes. With invention of new stronger materials and use expanding, the cost of them should moderate. The use to strengthen planes without weight should mean advances in aviation in the near future, imo.
(The real advance will come with gravity control.)
Which plane is bigger?
http://www.evergreenmuseum.org/the-sp...