AN ODE TO THE ANTONOV

 It has almost been four months since the Antonov (an - 225) has been turned into mangled metal and my ode comes late to this masterpiece of mankind. I have always felt that aeroplanes were the biggest and best masterpiece which mankind could ever make. The amount of precision which goes into making of an aeroplane is immense. These thoughts came cropping up in my mind while flying from Coimbatore to Bagdogra and on the way back.

I have a tendency to continually gaze out of the window or read while flying. This time, in my hand there was a book of Yuval Noah Harari but I was looking out of the window for most of the time. As I sat there and noticed the pattern of the clouds and began making mental notes on the shades of the sky, my mind drifted to the thought of the Antonov 225, called the Mriya in Ukrainian. 

Planes always fascinate me. This time too, while sitting in the narrow bodied A321 neo aircraft, I was wondering on this marvelous piece. As I thought of planes, their manufacturing has always seemed like a marvel to me. There were so many hundreds of people involved to make a single airplane. The scale was big and the amount of perfection and precision involved made it the supreme masterpiece ever built. The airplane was truly probably the best invention of the twentieth century. It connected the world and made the distances shorter. It was only an assertion to the fact that we are all one.

I continued to ruminate through these thoughts when the image of the Mriya propped up in my mind. It was the largest aircraft and that it had set more than two hundred world records since its inception in the 1980s. It was a freight aircraft meant to carry space shuttle for the Buran space programme from Moscow to Baikonur in present day Kazakhstan, the first rocket launching site in the entire world.  Even after a brief retirement in the 90s and the early 2000s, the an 225 returned to the skies. The image of the flight of the Mriya kept flashing in my mind. 

Then as I thought of all the glorious days of the an - 225, the scene of the remnants of the plane which was mangled metal flashed back in my mind. For me, when the news broke out in March that the Mriya no longer existed and that it had been destroyed on February the 27th came as a shocker. I felt my heart break when I came across the images of the remains of this wonderful plane on the internet.

I consider aircrafts as a work of art, a masterpiece which requires immense penance to make, it is the result of hard work and concentrated efforts of so many hundreds of people, the truly exemplary example of team work. So many hundreds of people come together to put one aircraft in place. This work of art, I have always thought is the most appeasing and that every bit pays of and the biggest satisfaction come when the plane flies. People from all over the world use this wonderful invention.

As this thought crossed my mind, I began to think of an universal lesson which I have been taught since childhood at home. The lesson was that science, technology, any form of art such as literature or music was universal. It is not something confined to defined boundaries but something which can traverse the entire world and everybody agrees to it in unison. 

While this thought has remained etched in my mind, I realized that the plane was landing and as it gradually descended its way through the clouds giving way to a picturesque view below, a thought arose in my mind that whatever happens happens for good and nothing lasts forever. Moreover, everything has got a bright side and the bright side of the sad demise of the current Mriya might mean that a more environment friendly an - 225 will be on its way, probably something even more better, a masterpiece which all of us are going to cherish for generations to come.