The importance of aviation in various spheres of life in almost any country in the world today is undeniable. This is most evident in the economy, for the successful existence and development of which transport is vital.

Moreover, the larger the state is, the more it needs aviation transport, especially if there is a need to develop hard-to-reach areas.

And such a need for one reason or another is almost always there. Without minerals the current civilization can not exist. And for them it is necessary to move into uninhabited or sparsely populated areas. The very notion of “inaccessibility” means the absence of any means of communication in those areas in which man carries out economic or any other activity.

Usually there are no roads or railroads. If waterways are present, they are usually frozen in winter. However, man has long lived and worked almost everywhere, and to maintain a sufficiently high quality of life, a constant and stable communication with the “Big Earth” is vital.

This is where the help of aviation, as a specific mode of transport, comes in. After all, it does not need roads, and the speeds of aircraft are high enough. The only problem is usually to create a vehicle that can fly over hard-to-reach areas in a sufficiently complex way. After all, this often means difficult weather conditions, taking off and landing from unprepared airfields (or even takeoff sites) of minimal size, with different pavement or no pavement at all.

The initial stage of creating the plane and putting it into production was complicated by the fact that a number of high-ranking officials and aviation specialists considered the project to be archaic. After all, the created aircraft was a biplane, and the time of biplanes by the end of the forties seemed to have passed.

The production of An-2 began to gather full speed after 1953 (death of Stalin and coming to power of N.S. Khrushchev, who was especially sympathetic to this aircraft in terms of its capabilities to work in the agricultural sector). The plane was serially produced at the plant # 437 in Kiev (Kiev State Aviation Plant “AVIANT” – nowadays it is a part of Ukrainian State Aircraft Concern “Antonov”).

Production of the AN-2 continued at plant No.437 till 1963 and during this period 3164 copies of various modifications were produced. Specialized agricultural version of the AN-2M was also produced at plant #464 in Dolgoprudny, Moscow Region (nowadays Dolgoprudny Research and Production Enterprise – manufacturer of weapons for air defense facilities).

However, the greatest number of AN-2 biplanes was produced in Poland. Since 1958 it was given the rights for the production of this aircraft and the order of its sale to the USSR was determined. The WSK “PZL-Mielec” plant in Melec, Poland, maintained full-scale production until the end of 1992, and some small batches were produced until January 2002.

Totally 11915 exemplars of AN-2 were produced in Poland. 10440 exemplars were delivered to USSR (and then to CIS after USSR disintegration).

Besides this plane was produced under the license in China in different variants with the names Shijiazhuang Y-5 and Nanchang Y-5. China is to this day the only country in the world, where the production of AN-2 is still going on.

More than 18,000 AN-2s were built and about 2,300 of them were in operation in 26 countries by the end of 2012. The greatest number of them (about 1,400 units) is in Russia. Most of these aircraft are in storage at the moment (about 1,000 pieces).

And An-2 itself already made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the only airplane in the world, which production does not stop for more than 60 years. Such longevity is determined by excellent capabilities and characteristics of the aircraft in its class, and numerous extremely positive reviews of flight personnel only confirm these qualities.