There May Soon Be A New "World's Largest Plane"

Tuckerfan · Mar 31, 2024

It'll be longer than a football field.

A startup wants to build the world's largest cargo plane big enough to carry wind turbines the size of a football field — take a look

A Colorado-based startup wants to build the world's largest cargo plane that's about the length of a football field.

Its sole purpose: to deliver giant wind turbine blades.

Radia — founded in 2016 by MIT-educated rocket scientist Mark Lundstrom — says it wants to usher in the next phase of wind energy by solving a logistics problem attached to installing larger wind turbines.

Tall turbine towers with bigger blades can harness more energy since they can take better advantage of the faster wind speeds available at high altitudes. But the bigger the blades, the harder they are to transport.

Obstructions such as highway overpasses, power lines, bridges, and tunnels create a logistics nightmare for the delivery of each blade. Radia says today's roads can "barely support" the blades stretching 230 feet.

Radia said this won't get any easier over time as future blades are expected to stretch more than 330 feet and "are not feasible to move on current infrastructure."

"Once fully constructed, a blade cannot be bent or folded, limiting both the route a truck can take and the radius of turns that it can make, often making elongated routes necessary to avoid urban roadblocks," according to the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Radia's giant cargo plane, called the WindRunner, hopes to fly over those barriers. The company says in press release materials that it plans to build a plane that's 356 feet long, has a wingspan of 261 feet, and is 79 feet tall.

For comparison, before it was destroyed by Russia in 2022, the behemoth Antonov An-225 — a Soviet-era cargo plane also used to carry over-sized loads such as wind turbine blades — was about 276 feet long, had a wingspan of 290 feet, and was about 60 feet tall.

The An-225's cargo volume was 46,000 cubic feet, and it could carry about 550,000 lbs of freight.

Radia's plane has a cargo bay volume of 272,000 cubic feet — 12 times that of a Boeing 747-400F — and a maximum payload weight capacity of 160,000 lbs, according to the company.

This size advantage will allow for the carrying of the more-than-300-foot-long blades — which are loaded through a nose door — and the building of more profitable onshore turbines, Radia said in a press release.

Regarding accessibility, Radia said the WindRunner will operate from regional hubs where the blade turbines are imported or produced, and deliver them directly to wind farms by landing on "a 6,000-foot semi-prepared dirt or gravel landing strip" at the sites.
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There May Soon Be A New "World's Largest Plane"

Tuckerfan BMF

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There May Soon Be A New "World's Largest Plane"

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