Giant cargo planes of the future

A design competition seeking the cargo aircraft of the 21st century

 

The competition, which ran for twelve months, ended on 15 August, with the winners announced at the 3rd Inter­national Air Transport Forum in Ulya­novsk, the southern Russian city where Volga-Dnepr was founded in 1990. The winning team was made up of Ilya Ageev, Sergey Borovykh and Nikolay Turbin, students at Moscow’s Aviation Institute.

 

A triple-decker

They impressed the jury, which consisted of Victor Tolmachev (the technical director at Volga-Dnepr as well as the chief designer of the ­An-124) with a 200-page feasibi­li­ty study for the design of a heavylift aircraft concept with a new aerodynamic configuration.

Their proposal consisted of a complete description and design study for a triple-decker aircraft in the An-225’s class. The unit will have two booms, between which there will be an external load capacity for «super-heavy and oversized cargo». This simultaneously represented a job application – the three students are now members of Volga-Dnepr’s design team. «We organised this competition for those interested in the future of air transport. For this reason we didn’t set any age limits. The youngest participant was 22 and the oldest 74 years old,» according to Artem Aroutynov, ­describing the company’s motivation.

 

Lucky winners and happy organisers

According to the deputy technical director and head of the design department at Volga-Dnepr, this means that the company has also been able to get to know many very talented people and received interesting, complex and incredibly ­detailed projects from ­Russia, Germany (the second prize went to a team based in Stuttgart), Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine. «The best of these are really useful design solutions that can be used in the aviation industry.»

Alexey Komarov, a graduate of Moscow’s Stroganov University of the Arts and Industry, received a special prize for his concept of a transport aircraft of the future (pictured above). The model he designed was displayed at Volga-Dnepr’s exhibition stand at the Air Transport ­Forum, and attracted the interest of many visitors. Read more

 

Source: ITJ

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