On the day the war began, one of Ukraine’s most decorated pilots stepped out onto his balcony to watch the battle being fought at a nearby airport. From where he stood, Oleksandr Halunenko could see the explosions and feel the aftershocks.
The Russians were invading his country, and he was worried about something he held dear. Mary. The airplane.
In a hangar a few kilometers away was the largest plane in the world, so special that only one of them was ever built. Her name is Mria (pronounced MerÃa), which in Ukrainian means “the dream”. With six jet engines, dual vertical stabilizers and a wingspan almost the width of a football field, it carried massive loads around the world, drawing crowds wherever it landed.
Aviation enthusiasts say it was a celebrity plane, loved by many. And it was a very dear symbol of Ukraine.
Halunenko was the first pilot of the plane and he loved him like a son. He converted his house into an altar: photos, paintings and models of the plane adorn every room. But that morning he had a terrible feeling. “I saw a lot of bombs, a lot of smoke. I understood that Mria couldn’t survive.”
In two months, the Ukrainian War has already destroyed a lot: thousands of lives, entire families, the happiness and security of countless people. And also material objects that mean a lot. Houses burned to the ground; supermarkets that fed bomb-stricken communities; belongings scorched beyond recognition.
In the case of Mria, which was hit directly during that airport battle, the destruction unleashed a flood of emotion that can only be described as profound sadness. With broken hearts, aviation fans are getting tattooed in his image. But perhaps there is no one as devastated as Halunenko, a member of a generation that doesn’t share emotions easily.
“If I weren’t a man, I would cry,” he says.
Halunenko is 76 years old and a child of the Cold War. His father was a captain in the Russian army and his mother was a Ukrainian peasant. Both died when he was a teenager.
At boarding school in southeastern Ukraine, he took flying lessons and discovered he had a gift. He became a MiG-21 fighter pilot and later an elite Soviet test pilot. He was commander of all types of aircraft, from new and sophisticated fighter-bombers to powerful cargo planes—but nothing as grandiose as what he would eventually command.
In the 1980s, the Soviet leadership was eager to get back into the space race. Engineers designed a reusable craft called the Buran that looked like the American space shuttle. But its components were scattered: the space shuttle was built in Moscow, the rockets hundreds of kilometers away, and the launch pad was in Kazakhstan. The only viable way to get everything to the same location was to use a plane—a really big one.
That’s how Mria was born, at the Antonov factory in Kiev. The plane made its first flight in 1988, with Halunenko at the controls. At 84 meters long and six stories high, the AN-225 was bigger than any other. It boasted 32 landing wheels and had a wingspan of 88 meters. Its maximum take-off weight reached an astounding 635,000 kilograms, far more than a fully loaded 747. The nose cone was turned up to allow large objects such as turbine blades or even smaller jets to be pushed into the cavernous belly.
There are different ways to measure size, but experts said the Mria was longer and heavier than other giant aircraft. “The AN-225 was without question the greatest aircraft ever built, of any type, for any use,” says aviation historian Shea Oakley.
It wasn’t easy to fly, especially when transporting a shuttle: it described wide arcs when turning — to demonstrate, Halunenko spread his arms sideways like wings and swung from side to side. On land, it was difficult to park it in a hangar.
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the space shuttle went down with it, and the Mria was used as a gigantic cargo plane: generators, pieces of glass, stupendous amounts of medical supplies, even battle tanks.
And the Ukrainians have not stopped working on it. In 2001 Halunenko broke records, including the heaviest load (253.8 tons) ever loaded onto an aircraft. Mria also holds the record for transporting the longest object ever carried on a plane (a 42-meter turbine blade) and for hosting an art exhibition at the highest altitude.
Halunenko received the acclaimed Hero of Ukraine medal. In 2004, he retired as a pilot, but the Mria continued in action: in the last two years it has made hundreds of flights, carrying medical supplies to combat Covid-19. On a trip to Poland, 80,000 people watched the landing broadcast live. Repainted in the yellow and blue of the flag, it was Ukraine’s winged ambassador.
His last mission was on February 2, according to Dmitro Antonov, one of his last pilots: he transported Covid test kits from China to Europe and returned to his base in Hostomel. “He was in great operational shape,” he says. “We expected it to continue in activity for another 15 to 25 years.”
With war looming, US intelligence services warned Ukraine that the Russians intended to seize Hostomel Airport and its extensive airstrip. Mria’s owners discussed the possibility of moving it to a safer location, Antonov says, but it never came to fruition. Company officials declined to comment on the decision.
At 6:30 am on February 24, Russian missiles hit a national guard base near the terminal. Hours later, helicopters bombed the airport, with missiles hitting the hangars where the Mria and other planes were stored, according to the Ukrainians. “We didn’t know he was still there,” says Sergeant Stanislav Petriakov. “We thought he had been transferred.”
A fierce battle ensued, but the Ukrainians soon ran out of ammunition, and they retreated into a forest. It is unclear how the Mria was destroyed.
Kiev forces say they intentionally bombed the runway to prevent the Russians from using it, but say their projectiles did not hit the plane, whose hangar is 700 meters from the runway. When asked who he thinks hit the plane, Antonov replies, “Nobody knows.”
For the next 30 days, as the Russians occupied and sowed terror in Butcha, where Halunenko has lived for over 20 years, the old pilot steadfastly resisted but couldn’t stop thinking about Mria. “He’s like my son,” he says. “I taught him to fly.”
In late March, when the Russians finally departed, Halunenko kept his distance from the airport. Until the night of the 17th. He passed burning trucks and crossed a battlefield of debris to get to the plane, walking over pieces of glass and metal.
Approaching slowly, he saw a shattered fuselage, with a huge hole in the middle, the nose cone cut in half by shrapnel, a torn wing and his commander’s seat lost in a tangle of blackened metal and ash. Halunenko stood there, expressionless.
His wife, Olha, who had accompanied him for support, whispered, “Oleksandr is a pilot. Right now he’s just processing the information. Later, emotions will hit him hard.”
Halunenko walked around, put his hand on a burnt-out engine and lowered his head. “We were hoping it could be fixed. But now we understand that we’re saying goodbye.”
But it is possible that all is not lost. Aware of the power of the Mria’s symbolism, the Ukrainian government has promised to rebuild the plane with the war reparations it hopes to wrangle from Russia.
And there is something that many are unaware of, a second half-finished Mria fuselage. Yuri Husiev, chief executive of Ubroboronprom, the state-owned company that manages Antonov, said the plan was to use it, with salvageable parts of the old one, to “build a new dream”.
