The world’s largest aircraft is set to be developed, as a way of transporting wind turbine infrastructure to hard-to-reach places.
The Windrunner
The plane, known as the WindRunner, is the brainchild of Mark Lundstrom, founder of Radia – a 2016 unicorn start-up that has raised nearly $100 million in funding from LS Power, Good Growth Capital, Capital Factory, Caruso Ventures and ConocoPhillips, among others.
Lundstrom saw an opportunity to expand wind energy, by finding a way around the challenges of transporting the gigantic machinery across country. The last seven years have been spent by him and his engineers developing an aircraft capable of lifting the massive loads.
The result is a humongous plane that is 109-metre-long, 24-metre tall aircraft, with an 80 metre wingspan – longer than a Boeing 747-8 by 32 metres and almost as long as an American football pitch. It can carry loads of up to 80 tons. What’s more, it can land “only requires a 6,000-foot semi-prepared dirt or gravel landing strip”.
This means the Windrunner is capable not only of transporting “ordinary” wind turbine loads to remote locations, but could take on board the elements of turbines the size of those found on offshore windfarms. These can reach lengths up to 91 metres and weigh over 35 tons. They normally can only be transported by specialised marine operations.
“Today’s largest wind turbines and the even larger ones of the future cannot be transported to prime onshore wind farms via ground infrastructure,” as Radia puts it, on its website.
Bringing offshore capacity ashore
But why would you want to install offshore-sized wind farms on land? Because, when it comes to wind technology, size matters. “Offshore turbines are more than two times as powerful as onshore turbines because they are bigger,” Lundstrom explained. “If we could move these large turbines onshore, they would be twice as profitable and open up three times more land for economically viable wind farms. Why not put them onshore? Because literal roadblocks stand in the way. Radia will respond by building WindRunner to overcome these barriers.”
The Windrunner could be built within four years, according to Lundstrom, with Radia more than half way through the required design, build and certify time. The company intends to manufacture a fleet of certified aircraft at its US assembly site in partnership with leading aerospace firms.
