World's biggest cargo plane to visit Melbourne Orlando International Airport
The world's largest operating cargo aircraft - a mammoth Antonov AN-124 plane - should descend for landing at Melbourne Orlando International Airport at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, June 28, making for a rare photo opportunity.
Operated by the Ukrainian carrier Antonov Airlines, the gigantic plane will pick up a hefty, undisclosed payload topping 50,000 pounds for delivery to the Pacific Northwest, said Cliff Graham, the Melbourne airport's director of operations and maintenance.
"It's the biggest. It can haul the most weight. It's all about payload capacity and the dimensions of the cargo hold. It has an extremely large cargo hold, bigger than any aircraft in the world," Graham said of the Antonov AN-124.
"So it specializes in items that won't fit in, say, a 747 cargo aircraft because the fuselage is smaller. A lot of times, (the cargo) are aerospace components - even parts of fuselages of other aircraft. Locomotives. Big items that normally don't fit in typical cargo aircraft," Graham said.
"The cargo hold is 14½ feet tall. It's 20-foot wide. And it's 120-foot long. It's big. It's a giant tunnel," he said.
An Antonov AN-124 last visited the Melbourne airport in March 2024, said Melissa Naughton, assistant director of business development and marketing. She said it picked up aircraft parts that were too large for other cargo planes.
Melbourne airport officials teased the Antonov AN-12's pending arrival time on Facebook and Instagram, describing the hulking aircraft as "an absolute icon." Graham said the plane will depart the airport about 10 a.m. Monday.
"The other cool thing about this airplane: It has 24 wheels. It has four wheels on the nose gear, and it has 20 wheels on the main gear. Lots of wheels. And that's to disperse the weight," Graham said.
In June 2023, an Antonov AN-124-100 transported the enormous Jupiter 3 satellite - which measured roughly the size of a school bus and weighed about nine tons - from builder Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, to Florida's Space Coast ahead of launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
That satellite launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY, where he has covered news since 2004. Contact Neale at Rneale@floridatoday.com. Twitter/X: @RickNeale1
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This article originally appeared on Florida Today: World's biggest cargo plane to visit Melbourne Orlando International Airport
Reporting by Rick Neale, Florida Today / Florida Today
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This story was originally published June 30, 2026 at 12:03 PM.