Did you see it? The world’s second largest cargo aircraft, the Antonov An-124 Ruslan, landed at the Henry E. Rohlsen Airport Sunday afternoon. The plane was scheduled to land on Saturday evening, but delays moved the arrival to Sunday.
It was carrying cargo for APTIM, a firm hired by the Virgin Islands Housing Finance Authority to perform recovery work in the territory, according to a person with direct knowledge of the cargo plane’s payload.
APTIM chartered the Antonov An-124 to deliver cargo to St. Croix for the Emergency Housing Repair VI program. The company said the delivery will allow it to get “all of the repairs for the homes completed because we had no material on island.”
The mammoth aircraft was designed in the 1980s by the Antonov Design Bureau in the Ukrainian SSR, then part of the Soviet Union (USSR). Until the Boeing 747-8F, the An-124 was, for thirty years, the world’s heaviest gross weight production aircraft. The An-124 remains the largest military transport aircraft in the world. The lead designer of the An-124 (and the An-225) was Viktor Tolmachev.
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