Antonov An-71 - Carrier Based Variant

Carrier Based Variant

It should be noted that the An-71 Madcap is often sited as a carrier based AWACS aircraft. In short it was not as is already described above under AWACS doctrine. However a highly modified design, the An-75, was proposed for use on the Soviet Aircraft Carriers under construction but the AVMF (Soviet Naval Aviation) canceled its development when it was realized that too much of a re-design would be needed to make the An-75 safe to operate off of any of the proposed aircraft carriers. The AVMF or Aviatsiya Voenno-Morskogo Flota (Literally Aviation for the Military Maritime Fleet,) decided to seek a second purpose built AWACS proposal using an improved Kvant-M version of the existing An-71/An-75's Kvant Radar by the Vega-M design bureau. The An-75, if built would have had engines mounted under the wing rather than above, similar to the latter An-74TK-300, and had many other structural and aerodynamic changes. In the end the An-75 would have only shared a slight commonality with the An-71/An-72 aircraft families and was deemed to costly to continue in-light of the clean sheet design the Yak-44E.