Aircraft

World's largest aircraft delivers colossal cargo to makeshift airstrips

View 8 Images
The Radia Windrunner offers a cargo volume seven times larger than the mighty Antonov
Radia
The Radia Windrunner offers a cargo volume seven times larger than the mighty Antonov
Radia
Designed to land on any reasonably flat piece of land at least 6,000 ft long, clear of obstacles
Radia
When built, it'll be by far the world's largest plane
Radia
Blades up to 105 m long will fit in this 108 m long fuselage
Radia
Pilots will ride rather high
Radia
Flip-top fuselage makes almost the entire length of the aircraft open for massive cargo
Radia
The Windrunner unlocks much larger wind turbines for on-shore use, and could therefore radically reduce the cost of wind energy
Radia
One enormous sword swallower of a plane
Radia
View gallery - 8 images

The 108-m (356-ft) long Radia Windrunner is designed to transport cargo too big for the road, to short, semi-prepared airstrips on rough terrain. It would dwarf the majestic 84-m (275-ft) long Antonov An-225 Mriya, which is sadly no longer with us.

With the notable exception of the Large Hadron Collider, there's really no machine in history with single parts larger than today's mammoth wind turbines. Some offshore turbines, for example, are being built with blades more than 140 m (459 ft) long. One of the reasons why they're not getting to this scale on dry land is that it's damn near impossible to move blades this size on the road.

Corners are too tight. Bridges are too low. Even blades half that size are a logistical nightmare – and sometimes the process is pretty terrifying to watch, as you can see in the video below. Wouldn't want a big gust that day!

But size really matters in wind power, where the swept area of your turbine is the key factor in how much energy you can harvest. The tips of the blades sweep a larger area than the sections closest to the hub, so there's a disproportionate area gain to be made for every bit of length you add. If onshore wind could start using blades nearly the size of what's being used offshore, more wind energy could be harvested at lower cost.

Thus, the idea of the Radia Windrunner – a transport solution you could design an entire turbine manufacturing operation around, and indeed one that wind farms would need to factor into their plans from day dot, because it's totally focused on moving absolutely colossal turbine blades.

If it was six feet longer, the Windrunner would stretch the entire length of an NFL football field, and with its 80 m (261 ft) wingspan, it's nearly three-quarters the width, too. At 24 m (79 ft) high, it's no taller than an Airbus A380 – but its flip-top front, with the cabin elevated right up at the top of the fuselage, allows the 108 m (354 ft) long plane to carry cargo up to 105 m (344 ft) in length, and 7.3 m (24 ft) in diameter.

Maximum payload weight is a whopping 72,575 kg (160,000 lb), maximum range is around the 2,000-km (1,200-mile) mark, and the volume of the cargo bay is some 8,200 cubic m (272,000 cubic ft) – seven times more than the mighty Antonov could offer. It'll be rather big.

Flip-top fuselage makes almost the entire length of the aircraft open for massive cargo
Radia

The idea is that you'd put an airstrip as close to your blade manufacturing facility as possible, and another right there at the location of the wind farm. You'd load a blade straight into the plane from the factory floor, and likewise you'd crane it up for installation pretty much straight out of the back of the plane.

In order to facilitate this kind of behavior, the Windrunner is designed to take off and land on a relatively short 1,800 m (6,000 ft) airstrip. To put that into perspective, your typical, much smaller passenger airliner typically uses a strip between 30-110% longer than that.

What's more, Radia doesn't even expect a proper paved airstrip. Presuming that a lot of wind farms will be built in open, flat country, it's designed the Windrunner to operate on "semi-prepared airstrips" – that is to say, simply an area that's been cleared of rocks, bushes, trees and other obstructions, like what a military aircraft might land on during an operation.

The Windrunner unlocks much larger wind turbines for on-shore use, and could therefore radically reduce the cost of wind energy
Radia

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Windrunner is a lot more than a set of renders, too – Radia has apparently raised US$104 million to the cause, and the company estimates that the bigger turbines it unlocks for onshore wind developers could reduce their cost of clean energy by as much as 35%, and make wind farms viable in a much wider range of locations. The company apparently believes it'll have the Windrunner built, tested and certified within around four years.

Certainly a remarkable project, and possibly one that could crack open all kinds of opportunities for clean energy developers once it's airborne. We look forward to following progress on this monster machine!

Source: Radia

View gallery - 8 images
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
20 comments
paleochocolate
104 million for an aerospace project as lofty as this one is nothing.
Pression de Gonflage
"Makeshift Airstrips".

Is that the new name for all that Gaffa Tape they are using to hold the tail in place ?
info
If you put a wind turbine horizontally, you have sort have got a helicopter. Just thinking they could fly themselves to their destination
WillyDoodle
Love the specialized audacity of this plane. Hope they can make it work.
Rick O
Very cool concept. I still think it would be better to just build them where you'll be using them. We ship massive amounts of cargo containers to all sorts of places to do fracking wells. I think a warehouse made of cargo containers that were used to haul blade production equipment should be feasible. Setup shop, build a few turbines worth of blades for the farm site, tear it down, move to the next spot.
WONKY KLERKY
Errrrrrrr - etc time:

Comparisons with the Anatov Myra is one of apples v oranges.

Ye Anatov offering was admittedly smaller in volume but had far greater weight carrying capacity.
It's recorded best lift and transport was 'a payload of 247,000 kg'
(Confirmation for this figure sought however even if exaggerated by 100% on true, the Myra was still was the greater lifter compared to the Windrunner)

Conclusion immediate to one aspect:
If the Chinese want, with their Windrunner to 'go military' (surprise surprise!) as is postulated above,
for an eg of use, say, lift MBT's, and their immediate crews, stores and spares,
they'll only be able to shift one at a time.
MarylandUSA
I'm going to have nightmares thinking about the size of this.
Jaxx
This seems like an application for an airship rather than an airplane. The blade(s) could be slung beneath it. And it wouldn't require the construction of a runway. You could use one of the wind turbine pylons as a temporary mooring mast.
Kpar
An idea whose time won't come. Even if the giant wind turbines were a good idea (they are not) the idea of a purpose-built airplane of this size is silly. The development costs would pay for a fleet of airships that can hover and lower their payloads via cranes, if not actually land on a single spot.
jimbo92107
Might be easier to transport a tubular blade factory 20 meters long to the wind farm site, make the blades on site as big as you want (paying out a long tarp), as many as you want, then disassemble the factory and take it to the next wind farm.