AEROFLOT’S INTERCONTINENTAL GIANT
Jul 02, 2019
3 minutes
BY ROBERT GUTTMAN
The peculiar passion that Russians seem to harbor for huge aircraft can be traced all the way back to 1913, when Igor Sikorsky built the Russky Vityaz, the world’s first four-engine airplane and the largest in the world at that time. Their enthusiasm for giants continued into World War I, with the production of Sikorsky’s four-engine Ilya Muromets, and persisted throughout the Soviet era. While many Soviet designers created gargantuan airplanes, the most consistently successful ones originated from the design bureau headed by Andrei Tupolev.
For more than 60 years
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