Giant cargo plane pays a visit to Wichita

An Antonov An-124 made a brief stop at Wichita’s Eisenhower National Airport on Thursday. The plane arrived in the pre-dawn hours from Tulsa and departed just after 10 a.m.

A small crowd of onlookers gathered on the west side of the airport, near Pawnee Prairie Park, to watch the plane’s departure to the south.

There are over 20 of the Russian-built airplanes still in service, and after the single, larger variant, the An-224, was destroyed at the start of the war in Ukraine, the An-124 is now the largest military transport plane in service in the world.

The airplane is nearly seven stories tall, 227 feet long and has a wingspan of more than 240 feet.