The world’s largest airplane, when it’s built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that’s sprouted wings—aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale.
Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it’ll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it’s transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn’t be moved over land, since they wouldn’t fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails.
So the WindRunner’s developer, Radia of Boulder, Colo., has staked its business model on the idea that the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there. “The companies in the industry…know how to make turbines that are the size of the Eiffel Tower with blades that are longer than a football field,” says Mark Lundstrom, Radia’s founder and CEO. “But they’re just frustrated that they can’t deploy those machines [on land].”
Radia’s plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may sound audacious—an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia’s supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job—the only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger.
Bigger turbines, after all, can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is: Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble?
Wind Turbine Blade Transportation Challenges
Lundstrom, an aerospace engineer, founded Radia nine years ago after coming across a plea for help from wind-turbine manufacturers. In their plea, posted as a press release, the manufacturers said they could build bigger onshore blades if there were simply a way to move them, Lundstrom recalls.
In the United States, for example, the height of interstate highway overpasses—typically 4.9 meters (16 feet)—won’t allow for bigger turbine blades to pass. The overpass limitation is true for Europe too. There’s more flexibility in the developing world, where there are fewer tunnels and overpasses generally, Lundstrom says. But many of the roads aren’t paved or hardened, which makes it much tougher to move 50-tonne objects around.
Some regions in China don’t have the same road constraints, allowing extralarge onshore wind turbines to be built there. Last year, Chinese multinational Sany Renewable Energy announced that it had installed a 15-megawatt model in Tongyu, Jilin province, in northeast China, with blades that are 131 meters long. The blades were manufactured in an industrial park in Inner Mongolia, an 1,800-kilometer trek from where they were ultimately installed.
The WindRunner WindRunner required unique design specifications to accommodate the ultra-long length of the wind turbine blades it will carry. Carl De Torres
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