Antonov

Antonov started in Novosibirsk in May 1946 as a design bureau under Oleg Antonov and moved to Kyiv in 1952, where it has been ever since. Around 22,000 aircraft have been built to its designs. The house style is consistent across nearly all of them: large, rugged, and able to work off unprepared strips. That covers the An-2 biplane, still one of the most produced aircraft in history, the An-12 and An-22 military transports, the An-24, An-26, An-30 and An-32 regional and utility types, the An-74 short-field transport, the An-124 Ruslan strategic airlifter and the An-225 Mriya, which was the largest aircraft ever built. Later programmes brought regional airliners into serial production, including the An-140, An-148 and An-158, and the An-70 propfan transport.

The company is a Ukrainian state enterprise. It was transferred from the Ministry of Economic Development to Ukroboronprom, now the Ukrainian Defense Industry joint stock company, in May 2015, and sits alongside the other Ukrainian aircraft plants under that structure. Its own industrial base has included the Antonov Serial Production Plant in Kyiv and the Civil Aviation Plant 410, which holds NATO AQAP 2120 certification for An-26 modernisation and carried out a large overhaul and modernisation programme on 40 Indian Air Force An-32 aircraft under a 2009 contract. Beyond aircraft the company has built LT-10A aluminium-bodied trams and Kyiv-12 trolleybuses, using the same lightweight structures expertise.

Antonov Airlines is the commercial arm, set up in 1989 initially with Air Foyle to market An-124 charters. It flies outsize and heavy cargo that no standard freighter can take, and as of 2025 operated seven An-124-100 and An-124-100M aircraft. Since 2022 the airline has worked from Leipzig/Halle in Germany rather than its former home at Hostomel near Kyiv.

The war has shaped everything about the current business, and the honest position is that much of what the company is doing now is not publicly detailed. The Hostomel airfield was attacked on 24 February 2022 and An-26, An-74 and An-225 airframes were destroyed there, the An-225 among them. Ukrainian authorities put restoration of the Mriya at over three billion dollars and five years of work. What has been publicly reported since is narrower and specific. Engineers completed an An-124 upgrade in June 2025 that removed all Russian-origin components and replaced them with Western and Ukrainian parts, and the aircraft flew to Leipzig in July. The first fully domestically sourced An-178-100R military transport, contracted for the Ukrainian armed forces in January 2021, was rolled out for flight and certification testing in December.

Antonov also markets design bureau engineering, flight test, certification and modernisation services independently of new-build aircraft, which has historically included work like the An-132 developed with Saudi partners. Employment stood at about 13,700 in 2014, and no reliable current figure is published. Production rates, capacity and order book under wartime conditions are likewise not disclosed and should not be assumed.