An-12 CUB

The An-12 belongs to the category of outstanding aircraft. Created in a surprisingly timely fashion, it had a good technical level, was built in sufficient quantity, and was easy to learn and easy to use. The An-12 brought recognition and worldwide notoriety to OK Antonov and the OKB team. Together with fighters of Mikoyan and passenger liners of Tupolev, and the entire Soviet aviation industry.

Probably, since the mid-sixties, no major event in the history of the country and even the whole of humanity has not been without An-12. From the development of uninhabited areas and the provision of assistance in the event of natural disasters to direct participation in armed conflicts and coups d'�tat, this is the range of application of the machine, which along with the Lockheed C-130 remained the main transport aircraft of the planet for many years.

The Antonov An-12 is the Soviet equivalent to the American C-130 Hercules. The An-12 is a development of the An-10, created by the Russian designer Oleg Konstantinovich Antonov. Easy to learn and unpretentious in operation, it deservedly earned recognition and worldwide fame, the aircraft was used and is still used in the national economy and military purposes.

There are legends that the development of the An-12 was initiated by Khrushchev during his visit to the OKB. He asked during an inspection of An-8, which there are analogs abroad. After he learned that there were similar planes with four engines, he assumed that in the USSR too, planes with four engines should be made. Then Oleg Konstantinovich Antonov conceived the future An-12. It is said.

The An-12 military transport aircraft was built according to the same scheme as the An-8, designed according to the same government decree as the An-10 passenger version. Thanks to a combination of excellent takeoff and landing qualities and the use of a chassis of high throughput, the aircraft continues to be successfully used today. For the creation of this aircraft chief designer Oleg Antonov and his four assistants in 1962 was awarded the honorary Lenin Prize.

According to its aerodynamic design, the AN-12 was a four-engine turboprop all-metal high-wing with single-tailed tail and a cargo hatch located in the tail. The fuselage of the machine with a raised tail section and a large cargo hatch made it possible to achieve convenient conditions for loading / unloading large-sized cargoes, as well as for parachuting them. The fuselage of the aircraft is made of aluminum and magnesium alloys.

Structurally, the fuselage almost completely repeated the construction of the fuselage of the passenger An-10. The main difference was in the aft part of the fuselage, where there was a cargo hatch and a tail rifle unit with an air-cushioned cab. And in the middle of the fuselage, instead of the passenger compartment, a leaky cargo cabin was made. At the same time, the front part of the aircraft, including the cockpit, constructively almost 100% repeated the front part of the An-10. The crew cabin was made airtight, from the non-hermetically sealed cargo compartment, it was separated by a hermal impeller with the door.

The first 100 serial An-12, because of the desire to unify them with the passenger An-10 as much as possible, had a hermetic design of the middle part of the fuselage and an unpressurized - tail, which unnecessarily increased the weight of the airframe and complicated production. However, the idea of "conversion" of a passenger aircraft into a military aircraft (and vice versa) did not justify itself: only one aircraft was converted from An-10 to An-12. Therefore, all further modifications of military-technical cooperation were carried out without regard for their passenger counterpart.

The AN-12 aircraft played a very important role in the formation of the Airborne Forces of the USSR. At one time, the AN-12 was the most massive aircraft of the BTA - military transport aviation. This machine made it possible to mass-scale the landing of both paratroopers and combat equipment of the Airborne Forces. The aircraft is able to take on board two combat vehicles made on the basis of the BTR-D, two combat vehicles of the BMD-1 or BMD-2 assault landing, the self-propelled unit 2S9 "Nona" or 60 paratroopers. In this case, the parachutists are arranged in four rows in the cargo cabin of the aircraft. The landing takes place in two streams: the first - fighters in the middle ranks, the second - fighters, located along the sides of the aircraft.