Non sequitur from non-pilot: I was once in Duluth, MN in the bitter cold and watched a Cessna with skis (for landing on the frozen lakes of the Boundary Waters) land at the airport. It was the utterly bewildering to see how slowly it was going in the air. And how little distance it took to stop. Short Landing Kit I assume. I've seen ducks and geese come into land on lakes at higher speeds!
"According to the operating handbook, the An-2 has no stall speed. A note from the pilot's handbook reads: "If the engine quits in instrument conditions or at night, the pilot should pull the control column full aft and keep the wings level. The leading-edge slats will snap out at about 64 km/h (40 mph) and when the airplane slows to a forward speed of about 40 km/h (25 mph), the airplane will sink at about a parachute descent rate until the aircraft hits the ground." As such, pilots of the An-2 have stated that they are capable of flying the aircraft in full control at 48 km/h (30 mph) ... This slow stall speed makes it possible for the aircraft to fly backwards relative to the ground: if the aircraft is pointed into a headwind of roughly 56 km/h (35 mph), it will travel backwards at 8 km/h (5 mph) whilst under full control."
I once got to ride in an An-2 on a tourist sightseeing flight. I've always remembered the sense that the pilot didn't even bother to line up with the runway ahead of time when landing, but simply took a gentle turn onto it upon reaching it, at roughly the speed of a car.
I'm sure this is a slight exaggeration in my memory, but it really was able to fly incredibly slowly and take turns in an incredibly short distance.
You'd think that sort of handling would make for some interesting use cases-- aerial photography for example, maybe some sorts of cropdusting where the slower speed offers more precision.
I wonder if there's anything else built that fits that market today, since I suppose it's a hard-sell to convince Western pilots and businesses to buy Soviet old-stock.
An-2 specifically is kinda popular with Western collectors, as far as I know. But if there were still broad applications for this kind of performance, surely we'd see more modern designs along those lines?
For An-2, the ability to perform such tricks wasn't really the goal, just a side effect. The goal was to have a cheap mass-produced utility plane that could take off and land on very rough makeshift airstrips in remote locations, which were plentiful in USSR at the time when it was designed (~1950). These days there's probably way fewer locations like that, and for those that do exist, helicopters provide an adequate solution without the need to design a new dedicated airframe. Note that all those benefits aren't free, either: the downsides of the design include high fuel consumption and high noise levels.
As far as I know, even in Russia, most present-day use of An-2 is for skydiving.
I have been a passenger in a C-170 with a STOL kit that flew backwards over a beach on the Washington coast. We landed well behind where we took off. The takeoff and landing were both nearly vertical. Had a steady wind from the ocean.
