The positioning of the new navigational equipment required the flightdeck to be raised by 41 cm in comparison to the An-24,[3] giving the aircraft its other main feature, a hump containing the cockpit.

[1] In addition to its principal use as a survey aircraft, it has also been used by Bulgaria,[9] Czech Republic, Romania,[10] Russia and Ukraine to carry out surveillance under the Open Skies Treaty.

Some have been fitted with frozen tanks of carbon dioxide to be ejected into the sky to form artificial rain clouds.

These An-30s have also been put to use to avoid crop-damaging hailstorms and also to maintain good weather for, as examples, new airplane maiden flights, important parades like 1 May and the 850th anniversary of Moscow in September 1997.

[12] Between 1971 and 1980 a total of 115 aircraft were built and 23 were sold abroad to Afghanistan, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Mongolia and Vietnam.

An-30s completely mapped Afghanistan in 1982, with one shot down by a MANPADS during an aerial photography flight in the Kabul area south of the Panjshir Valley on 11 March 1985.

On 22 April 2014, a Ukrainian An-30 was hit by pro-Russian separatists' small-arms fire while on a surveillance mission over the town of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine.

[13] On 6 June 2014, a Ukrainian An-30B was shot down near the city of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine, reportedly by a MANPADS fired by local separatists.