danohagan
December 27, 2004 at 1:28 pm

Ant-20 "Maxim Gorky"

Was reading about this Tupolev beast of the 1930s in one of the books I got for Christmas. Fascinating story. Anyone got any pictures close to hand they’d like to share?

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By: Flanker_man - 27th December 2004 at 19:24

Just a little nit-pick – for the sake of historical accuracy….

The designation is ANT – Aye En Tee – not ‘Ant’.

The intials are for Andrei Nikolayevich Tupelov – the head of the OKB that included such luminaries as Sukhoi, Mikoyan, Polikarpov, Lavochkin, Petlyakov etc.

It wasn’t until the Great Patriotic War (WWII to you and me) that the conglomerate OKB was ‘split’ into smaller OKB’s headed by the above.

And it was only then that the aircraft produced by them were prefixed by the designers names – Tu, Su, La, MiG, Pe, Po etc.

Antonov’s OKB has the prefix An – so it is easy to confuse Antonov (An) with ANT (Tupolev).

Ken