There have been proposals dating back to the 1990s to re-engine the B-52 with high-bypass turbofans. Over the summer, the British entrepreneur and aviation enthusiast Richard Branson visited the wreckage and expressed excitement about helping in its restoration, when the time came. President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last May that Ukraine would rebuild the Mriya, the only one of its kind ever completed. “There are just no words,” he said of the plan to build a new Mriya. Valery Romanenko, an aviation analyst, has said to Ukrainian media that Antonov should focus only on “doing something urgent for the armed forces” during the war, such as making drones. Yes, there is a lot of work to do, but we are working.” But critics say that devoting money and energy to rebuilding the plane would be a misplaced priority. “They have to know this plane is not abandoned. “People should have hope,” said Vladyslav Valsyk, deputy director and chief engineer of Antonov, a state-owned company. If something as gargantuan and complex as this airplane can be restored, they say, so can the rest of the country. But it is meant in part as an inspiration, according to executives at the aircraft company that owns it, Antonov. Measured against those daunting challenges, the work on the new plane is hardly a top priority from a humanitarian point of view. With the war still raging, the immense job of rebuilding Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of homes, hospitals, schools and bridges are blown up, still seems a distant prospect. The restoration of the plane, whose name in Ukrainian means The Dream, has begun. Piece by piece, workers are now dismantling the wreckage of the gigantic Mriya cargo plane, the heaviest airplane ever flown, with plans to build a new one with salvaged parts. So are the tailplane, flaps, hydraulic systems, fuel pumps and three of six engines of the plane, which was destroyed in fighting in the first days of the war. ET HOSTOMEL, Ukraine - The gigantic twin tail fins, once stretching as high as a six-story building, are gone. Restoring a Giant Plane: Ukrainian Resilience or Folly? Ukraine, with far more pressing needs, plans to rebuild the colossal Mriya cargo plane, a symbol of pride that was destroyed last year in a battle for its airfield. Center of gravity issues must have been slighty easier to handle (well, for the computers & FBW system) on Buran, with so much weight removed from the back. Hence Buran pair of turbojets weighed as much as 1*SSME, and the Shuttle had three of them. One SSME is 3200 kg, and the Shuttle had three of them in the back. Buran AL-31 were unreheated Su-27 engines, aproximately 1500 kg in weight. the AL-31 jet engines went flanking the vertical tail - where the Shuttle had its OMS pods instead - Note: before 1974 the Shuttle ferry jets (TF30s, then F401s) were to be hanged below the wing and TPS, in a removeable big pod. And this meant two things - Buran OMS went to the back end - where the Shuttle had its 3*SSME. It's interesting to compare the Shuttle and Buran three main propulsion systems - the main rocket engines - the two OMS - the planned jet engines (deleted in '74 for the Shuttle, kept to the very end on Buran but not flown) In a sense, Buran dropped its SSME-look-alike engines into its Energiya rocket carrier.
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