My Nuclear Family by Christopher Brownfield

Author:Christopher Brownfield [Brownfield, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59428-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

They say that a camel looks like it was designed by a committee. However, the Antonov AN-225 Myria is a plane that actually was designed by a committee—a Cold War Soviet Russo-Ukrainian central planning committee, to be precise. The AN-225 is as close as a plane can get to a camel with wings. It is ungainly, round and thick, with huge sloping wings that appear to droop under the weight of its six enormous jet engines. Designed to carry the Russian space shuttle on its back for spectacular sky launches, the one-of-a-kind Myria is the largest airplane in the world that can actually carry cargo. There would have been two such airplanes, but the collapse of the Soviet Union left little room for such governmental behemoths in the capitalistic competition of commercial aviation fleets, so the second plane was canceled. For most customers, the smaller AN-125s, C-130s, and 747s were more than adequate. Needless to say, the Ukrainians who now owned the plane had never met a customer like me.

“What, precisely, are you trying to do again?” a gentleman with a British accent inquired incredulously on the other end of the phone. The gentleman was an official for the British company that operated the AN-225 for the Ukrainian owners. I repeated that I wanted to rent his plane to fly some marine diesel engines into Iraq. There was an awkward pause.

“I see,” the gentleman stated, still sounding a bit puzzled.

“If we can get it to work, it might be possible to charter up to twenty flights,” I explained. Suddenly the gentleman became much less puzzled.

“Right. I’ll send you the specifications right away!”

“Thank you, sir!”

The plane’s technical specs arrived by e-mail, and they were extremely impressive. Loaded up and with a full tank of fuel, the Myria weighs over 1.2 million pounds, making it the single heaviest thing ever to take off and land again on its own propulsion. As amazing as this may be, the weight limit still fell shy of what we needed to heft the Wärtsiläs, and the cargo hold was too small by at least a meter in height. It looked like a quick, fatal blow to the project. I reported back to Perkins that the biggest plane in the world couldn’t even come close to the task.

“At least we tried, Chris … At least we tried.”

I went back to work for Captain Cross, cranking out PowerPoint slides, briefing the commanding general, and sipping coffee in front of my computers while slowly going insane. There were no trips planned to the Ministry of Electricity that week, so time seemed to drag on forever.

There’s got to be a way to move those engines. We’re just not approaching this the right way.

If any of us had learned a bit of history before coming to Iraq, we could have realized that Arab ingenuity had overcome such problems before. But in our present state of ignorance, we simply had to think a bit harder. In 1953 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was faced with a similar problem of logistics.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.