While not everyone agrees on the installation of wind turbines in their proverbial back yards, one thing not up for debate is that there is a drive to build them bigger, and bigger. Big turbines means big blades, and big blades need to be transported… somehow. If air freight is going to stay relevant to the industry, we’re gonna need a bigger airplane.
A startup called Radia has a plan for that plane, and it is a doosie. The “WindRunner” would clock in at a massive 108 meters (354 feet) long, but with a wingspan of just 80 m (262 ft). That’s very, very long, but it might not be the largest airplane, depending how you measure it. Comparing to the 88 m wingspan for the late, lamented An-225 Mriya, you can expect a lower payload capacity, but heavy payloads aren’t the point here. Wind turbine blades really aren’t that heavy. They’re big, or they can be — the WindRunner is designed to fit a single 105 m blade within its long fuselage, or a pair of 90 m blades.
That’s very little clearance, which is why the cockpit sits up top in a bulge that makes the thing look a bit like an enormous Carvair, for anyone who remembers that old prop-job — except for the H-tail, that is. That’s for a different reason than the An-225’s use of the same feature, which was to keep the tails out of the wash of a back-mounted “Buran” space shuttle. With the WindRunner, the H-tail is simply so the tail will not be too tall to fit existing airport infrastructure. The Lockheed Constellation used a triple-tail for the same reason, way back when.
Image: Eduard Marmet, CC3.0
The aircraft will of course be short-runway and rough-field capable, capable of taking off and landing on dry packed dirt or gravel in just 1,800 m, or 6000 ft — a little more than 10x its own enormous length. The payload it hauls into those rough fields will break no records at only 72.6 tonnes; Mriya could do 250 tonnes, but again, heavy lift isn’t the goal here.
This plane has a very specific mission, to the point that we argue it might just qualify as a hack. It will be interesting to see if Radia can sign enough customers to get one (or more) built.
The concept is interesting. I think their stated timeline (flying by 2030) is so laughably unrealistic as to make me seriously wonder if the whole thing is a scam. Or perhaps their CEO is just taking classes at the Elon Musk school of “just say whatever date vibes best.” We all remember when that Dragon capsule landed on Mars back in 2018, don’t we?
How many years does it take for the windmill to offset the carbon generated by 6 flights (3x blades, there and back)
Less than a month, VERY conservative calculation for a 3MW wind turbine replacing equivalent gas generators, and 3 hour per flight. If replacing coal, just days.
If we consider that 200m diameter wind turbine generates maximally 12MW (12MWh each hour), and that typical airliner burns about 8000 gallons of diesel each hour (that’s equivalent of 323MWh each hour), then each hour of flight requires 26 hours of full power operation. So, for a 6 hour flight, that would be a week under full power.
A carbon goose?