Originally posted by Interflug62M
The aircraft was originally designed to carry the giant Soviet SS20 missile in one piece so had a very specific task to perform. All were built for the Soviet Air Force and operated by their crews, some were painted in Aeroflot colours to ease operations around the globe. As far as I know Aeroflot never owned any of them in the true sense, prior to the end of the Soviet Union.
Allow one of the drunkards from the ever peaceful and highly docile Modern Military board to nitpick…
The main reason for the An-22s development was indeed to haul strategic nuclear missiles from their factories to remote launch pads deep inside Russia. These were not SS-20s as this were relatively small missiles on a mobile launcher, but those huge silo-launched ones. The An-22 would have flown the missiles to the closest airbase, after which massive Mi-12 helicopters would fly the missile to their launch sites. Unfortunately the Mi-12 never made it beyond two prototypes (both survive, one at the Monino museum and one at the Mil plant at Moscow-Panki) so this never got anywhere.
Luckily, the An-22 did enter service as a heavy, long-range transport with the V-TA, the transport branch of the Soviet air force. They operated from three bases: Seshcha (now home to the An-124, very impressive to see some fifteen of them in dispersals), Ivanovo (the training base, now also the home of the A-50 Mainstays or the Il-76-with-radar-saucer) and Tver-Migalovo, formerly known as Kalinin-Migalovo. At the latter base, you can still find the one and only camouflaged An-22 which is looking awfully great. Some other An-22s did fly around with tactical codes (or bort numbers as us military folks like to call ’em), but mostly they wore their SSSR- and later RA- registrations.
Here is one of the coded An-22s, one of the early production machines without the radar-lip above the navigator’s station.
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