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?
i really don’t know what all goes into production of something like this. But it will be a lot less than goes into a ‘regular’ mass-produced plane. It doesn’t need to prove it’s safe enough to carry passengers. It doesn’t need to have an assembly line designed / optimized to produce dozens or hundreds of them. It doesn’t need to invent a uniform pilot training regimen for the thousands of commercial pilots.
It seems a lot more like the Rutan Voyager than like other planes. Every prototype will potentially be the finished product as well. And Voyager managed to go from dream to completion in just over 6 years, and only about 2.5 years of flight testing. And on a shoe-string budget and doing totally novel processes with a development team that wasn’t familiar with building large airplanes at all.
I don’t know what these guys’ plan really is but it’s not inconceivable to me. i don’t think they’re doing anything too novel, and it seems like they might attract a big investment because people are already spending a bunch of money to solve this problem. That is, if they can actually convince anyone this will be long-term cheaper / more effective.
Voyager was an experimental airplane for a singular purpose.
These guys are planning commercial use, which, even if it’s just ONE airframe, means it will need to be certified by the FAA. That’s an entirely different ballgame.
If you told me you wanted to have a clean sheet general aviation aircraft flying in 5 years, I’d believe it could be done and would still put the odds at under 50% of it actually happening.
Something this large and complex? (Much, much more complex, systems-wise, than Voyager). I’d be willing to wager a pretty large chunk of money that it won’t ever be built (not because it’s impossible, more because business), and and even larger chunk that if it is, it will not be in 2030.
this is much simpler than Voyager, mostly because it’s not trying to do anything new. it’s a very “regular” airplane by modern standards but with a swollen ballooned body.
and another Rutan airplane, White Knight, shows that it’s possible for commercial operators to do experimental aircraft on a reasonably short schedule. i don’t know any details, but clearly experimental aircraft / one-offs are not limited to amateurs.
but i agree i’d put it less than 50% even though i rate it possible. :)
FAA? I thought Tr*mp banned windmills? Anyway, perhaps the US is not the target market here? I mean China for instance is pretty large and needs their wings transported too.
And there is south/middle America and the European continent, theoretically you could run this business without ever looking at the US and their iffy governmental orgs.
I agree but with one exception: where do you get a 6000 ft by 200ft runway close to turbines?
It is supposed to be rough-field capable. We’ll see.
While I agree with you that it’s kinda crazy to imagine that such a huge one trick pony makes any kind of economic sense, much less that it could be built on a 5 year schedule, we should remember that this sort of crazy thing has been done before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Stratolaunch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Super_Guppy
You just gotta be crazy enough to do it.
OF these three, the Guppies are the only profitable ones.
So, you’re saying “crazy big airplanes” are batting .333. That… might actually be better than most big aerospace projects. Certainly good enough for a nice MLB contract.
But 3 times better than a Silicon Valley Startup.
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.
Thanks Ivan +1
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.
I think Bill is asking how long would it take to offset the carbon emissions of the flights, not how long it will take to generate the same energy.
Those are the same thing. A turbine offsets carbon emissions by generating energy from wind which prevents fuel from needing to be burned at a conventional power plant.
I take a 747-400F using a full tank of gas for a return trip- 200,000L @43MJ/L = 8.3days @12MW.
If you were instead burning the Jet A1 in a combined cycle power station at 60% efficiency = 14 days.
If you allow for UK windfarm capacity factor for recent large turbine of 40% =31days.
(https://wattdirection.substack.com/p/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors)
And if you allowed for 2/3 blades capacity = 46 days
Assuming the plane is far more reliable than the wind turbine.
A carbon goose?
How did they not decide to call it “Blade Runner?”
Because when you’re cruising at 30,000 ft, a takedown notice could be catastrophic 😂
It is possibly already a trademark.
Trademarks are registered for specific classes of products or services.
This.
So it’s easier/cheaper to design a new plane than multipart wind turbine blades that could be assembled on site?
currently it’s impossible to create a multipart blade, so yes, you are correct.
Hmm, interesting. I’ve wondered why they don’t do this, i assumed there was a good reason but I didn’t realize it was that big of a challenge. Consider me nerd sniped, now I have something to look up!
I’d have to argue it isn’t actually impossible. But you really want the turbine to be as light as it can possibly be and still do the job under the wind load (which as these scales is considerable) as that lets it spin up easier, makes building the tower and attaching the blade bits easier and faster. And you really really don’t want more critical points of failure that might fling a half tone or more of blade tip a very very long way – so single part in the end composite structures just end up seeming much more optimal.
Another way of viewing it, is that if it is possible to make in N metres long with a join, then it is possible to make it N*k longer without the join. Because the higher you get the blades from the ground the more power you get, it is even less material for the same power output.
The delivery issue of future even bigger blades, will add more advantages to offshore where you can deliver directly by barge, or perhaps to huge windfarms that are big enough to site a blade factory within a straight line drive, or perhaps a semi-mobile blade factory.
Carvair? they could’ve gone with DC4R.
Does the blade need to go inside the plane? Seems like this gets easier if not.
haha i was thinking the same thing. It seems super impossible because the blade has its own (asymmetric) aerodynamic shape that will be really difficult to design around…but you can imagine an asymmetric airframe that compensates for it.
Seems like the trade off is a massive increase in the complexity and novelty of the aerodynamic modelling, in exchange for a decrease in the construction costs, and possibly operational costs too (loading/unloading/fueling).
Suppose you were setting up 4 wind turbines. Seems much like a single quadcopter to me…
They’re also trying to market the idea to other customers, including the military. Having a proper cargo bay that can handle things other than a windmill blade expands the potential customer base.
I can’t help wondering … what if by the time they get this built, the real market is in 125 meter blades?
Still a lot of market left for the previous size, especially replacements.
Oooh! Oooh! New idea: Bolt the blades on the sides of the plane to use them as wings! Of course, then you have to tow the plane home with a tractor …
Was thinking similar, but more along the lines of the blades (all three) being the rotor for a gigantic gyrocopter, with the pylon being the body. You could even use the generator to spin the blades up a bit and and/or just provide the propulsion.
Simples…
@Mel and @Snarkenstein are on to something.
Self transporting cargo
The gyrocopter idea is an amazing hack. Someone should do a scale model to see how badly the blade geometry does.
You wouldn’t need any Jet A1 if you fitted it with trolley-poles and just flew along the electricity grid.
A 200m diameter gyro copter at 100m, would certainly be memorable.
Why not hire a couple of Goodyear blimps during the week while they are doing nothing else.
In other words, a lighter than air vehicle vs heavier than air.
72.6 tonnes per wing. Maybe if you lifted one blimp with another blimp, and another…
Nice idea but lots of problems with the implementation. The Goodyear blimps can only carry a maximum of 5,181lbs while a single blade can weigh in excess of 14,000lbs. The blimps cruise at 40mph and have a max speed of 78mph, so while they burn less fuel at 9 to 10 gallons per hour, it’ll take them longer to get from point A to point B, thus negating that benefit. Now, if we still had something like the Hindenburg around, it could lift 511,000 lbs, though its max speed was 84mph.
References:
https://www.airships.net/goodyear-blimp/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship
So you have 3 blimps side by side carrying one blade. Attached partly via bungee ropes to help even out the strain between the three. Heck why not add a 4th for RAIB5?
LTA is an option, but they’ve got huge sail area. It turns out that the places people want to put wind turbines tend to be windy, which makes for very awkward handling.
Read on on of the USAF news aggregators that this concept is also being pitched as a potential strategic airlift replacement for the C-5 and C-17 platforms.
I saw that too, but I think it’s more aspirational and “let’s get some press” than real.
The specs on Windrunner seem to be pretty optimized to be the equivalent of last-mile-delivery system for wind turbine parts, getting them from the port to the inconveniently located inland windmill farms which have to be where the wind actually blows.
Windrunner’s cargo bay, while huge, is awkwardly shaped and unpressurized. It’s actual lift capacity is pretty small, and it’s range is limited, it’ll never do a transPac without a couple of hops.
None of these things matter to moving a fiberglass turbine blade, but will be kind of important to military customers, who tend to move heavy, dense cargo, which sometimes needs to breathe, with trans-oceanic range.
The weight thing is especially important. It’s the reason the Airbus 380 never made it as a cargo carrier. It had enormous volume to offer, but only had about the same lift capacity as a 747. Once you started packing in cargo containers you would run out of weight way before you would fill the thing up.
This is true, but some things the military hauls– like Helicopters– are volume-limited, not mass-limited. I doubt the Pentagon would finance a production run of these beauties, but I could see them contracting one out on occasion if a fleet happened to get built. The range would still be a problem, though.
I could see it as standard wings, standard engines, a standard tail, standard heavy dirt-strip landing gear, standard cockpit/cabins, standard nose-lift system.
Then you would need decent software to layout and model a custom fuselage for a particular need, which seems entirely do-able for a non-passenger freighter, which doesn’t need to be super optimised in any way – just capable of doing it’s job.
So now you just need a manufacturing process to allow the quickish building of very large 1 off composite fuselages, so you can make one before the market need disappears.
At this point I would see making another custom freighter within the basic lift capacity as a 1 year job.
A good business for Ukraine/Antonov
Why not manufacture blades and other components at or near the use site, move small parts by land transport , save all this argument for some other application.