Back around 1990, I saw an Antonov AN-72 at the Farnborough show. This was the time as the wall came down and eastern bloc aircraft started to appear at shows. After that, I don’t think I saw one again. That changed at RIAT this year when the Egyptian Air Force brought an AN-74 – an updated version of the original Coaler. The feature of this plane that gets lots of attention is the location of the engines. They are mounted above the wing and employ upper surface blowing. The exhaust from the engines is entrained but the upper surface of the wing which increases the lift and reduces approach and take off speed.
However, the thing I had never appreciated before seeing the plane at Fairford was the span of the wing on this plane. When it taxied in towards us, I got a view of it head on which showed just how large the span is. It is massive. The upper surface blowing only impacts close to the engines, so the rest of the wing is not affected. I wonder how much it matters. It was interesting when it took off at the end of the show that the takeoff run seemed quite long. It didn’t seem like a STOL aircraft. Anyway, forget all that and look at this amazing wingspan!
I shared some images of the Egyptian Air Force AN-74 that came to RIAT in 2025 in a previous post. I took a ton of shots during RIAT and have been pretty busy throughout the rest of 2025 so took forever to get through some of the images to cull them down. When looking through some of the shots at the end of 2025, I was quite taken by the high lift system on the AN-74. Previously I focused on the span of the wing but here are some shots that show the flap system and the surfaces across which the engine efflux passes to generate additional lift. It is quite a feat of engineering.
