Built by Ukrainian aircraft maker Antonov, the behemoth is used only for transporting freight. It has a wingspan of 88 meters (289 feet), compared with the A380's 80 meters, and measures 84 meters in length, compared with the A380's 73 meters.

However, the An-225 Mriya, meaning "dream," stands lower than the A380 at 18 meters compared with 24 meters for the Airbus plane.

Derived from the Antonov An-124 and powered by six engines, the An-225 can carry up to 250 tonnes of freight at up to 850 kilometers an hour (528 mile an hour).

The only example of the plane, which was first built to carry the Soviet space shuttle the Buran, took to the skies for the first time in 1988.

After years of neglect due to a lack of money following the break-up the Soviet Union, the plane made a test flight in 2001 from Gostomel, a city near Kiev. That year the plane was presented at the Paris Air Show.

Before returning to the skies, its structure was reinforced at a cost of 20 million dollars (15 million euros).

Since then, the airplane has been used as a cargo plane bu Antonov Airlines, a subsidiary of the Antonov group founded in 1946 by an aviation engineer of the same name.

In 2002, Antonov offered its services to Airbus to help ship parts of the future A380 from different production sites in Europe in case of difficulties or delays on land routes. However, Airbus judged that solution to be technically impossible because of the size of the A380 parts.

An earlier giant aircraft, billionaire Howard Hughes' flying boat, better known as the Spruce Goose, had a wing span of 97 meters and a length of 67 meters. It only flew once and very briefly at that in 1947.

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