Cool plane, often called the C-5ski due to its resemblance to a C-5. Cant say for sure if it was an attempt to copy the Fred. If it was, it wasn't a very good one. One thing I heard they tried to copy, but couldn't get right that you can see in the picture was the landing gear. Ours is fairly complex and rotate to store flat underneath the fuselage. Theirs just retract into the pods on the side of the fuselage. I've also heard they have to replace rear tires often because they scrub in turns whereas we have a castering system.
Specifically, those are the dual (quadruple?) nose wheels. They kneel on the ground to make nose loading easier.
I first thought "C-5" until I remembered that the C-5 has all four nosewheels on a single strut, but at least I was in the ballpark. There was an An-124 parked on the south side of ATL when my flight taxied out a couple of weeks ago.
I heard that the Soviets had all kinds of trouble making a workable high-bypass turbofan, hence the lousy performance (by Western standards) of the Il-86. Then they invaded Afghanistan and conveniently found an abandoned DC-10 from the Afghan airline. So they took one of the engines back home and reverse-engineered it. The result was the An-124 (and the Il-96).
In a side note Lou my dad flew on one of his bucket list planes. He flew yesterday on lh471 from Toronto to frankfurt on a 747-400. He was very happy to do so I can tell you that.
I inspected one at Abbotsford in 1990 and noticed that there were four spare wheels in the cargo bay. Yes, when they turn the airplane the wheels just scrub around leaving huge skid marks on the ramp.
