Fly Me Friendly

I got word this morning from Carlo at Flight Experience Melbourne that he’d just arrived at Melbourne airport (YMML) and seen an Antonov parked on the ramp. Talk about perfect timing as I was taking one of my workmates to the airport for his trip home to Sydney (flying Tiger Airways – good luck with that!).

After dropping him off, I shot off around to the viewing area near the AirServices compound on Operations Rd. As expected, this was too far away to be of much use for photos, but gave me an excuse to go check out where it was parked (and take a couple anyway, what the heck).

On my way back I stopped off at one of the ramps where some of the cargo, VIP and QANTAS maintenance operations are so I could get a shot of the Ansett DC-3 (VH-ABR) parked in front of a RAAF BBJ (A36-002) and the A319 that flies to the “blue ice runway” in Antarctica (VH-VHD). Nice :)

I then scooted back around towards the main terminal area, stopping on Link Rd to get a distance shot of the An-124 that, although a bit further away, was better as it had fewer fences & hills in the way. From there I headed back to the freight area and started hunting around for a good view of the ramp. Fortunately I found a spot where I could park the car and get up to a fence, shooting through the links to get a reasonably good view of the beastie.

While I was snapping the shots, a QANTAS 737 was being towed from maintenance to the terminals, letting me get a good size comparison shot. Yes, that thing is *huge*

Not sure why it was parked on the ramp at Tulla, but if I find out I’ll be sure to post it here. Meanwhile, you can see all the shots I took (including larger copies of each shot) over at the YMML Antonov page on my photo gallery.