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When it takes to the skies, the Radia WindRunner will be the world’s largest cargo plane. As fascinating as it is, what’s most interesting about Radia to me isn’t the aircraft itself. Indeed, founder and CEO Mark Lundstrom told me over coffee that he directed the company’s engineers to follow the mantra of “do nothing new.” The plane is built using existing technologies to ease the engineering and subsequent certification process. Radia will be an energy company, building clean energy projects, says Lundstrom. And those wind projects are only the cornerstone in Lundstorm’s vision of a much bigger energy company. Read more from TIME's Justin Worland.
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. 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. Radia's giant cargo plane, called the WindRunner, hopes to fly over those barriers.
A U.S. startup has emerged from stealth with the promise of enabling the aerospace industry to tap into the growing renewable energy market and diversify a business base built on passenger and cargo aircraft. (Subscription required)
Radia has come up with a way to transport the biggest, most efficient wind turbines to inland sites that would otherwise be blocked by bridges, tunnels, and winding roads. Radia foresees that the availability of new wind turbines for onshore use will open up new opportunities for wind development. The company is already looking beyond the goal of simply serving as an airborne shipper of parts for wind farms.
There’s a global energy crisis and onshore wind farms are a potential growth option. Larger wind turbines produce more power than standard ones, but the components are too big to be transported by road. What’s the solution? A Colorado-based energy startup named Radia has an idea. It’s developing the biggest aircraft in aviation history. Meet the WindRunner airplane, whose mission will be to deliver gigantic 300-foot-long blades directly to wind farms.
The bigger a wind turbine, the more energy it produces—which is why offshore wind farms have turbines with blades that are as long as a football field. But the largest equipment that exists today can’t be used on land because it’s too big to be delivered on roads. A startup called Radia is working on one potential solution: The largest plane ever made, designed specifically to carry the biggest wind turbine blades to new wind farms while running on sustainable aviation fuel.
Sitting at a mammoth 356ft long, the revolutionary WindRunner would be longer than the pitch at Wembley Stadium and could hold a whopping 12 times more load than a Boeing 747. Set to carry the huge and heavy blades of a wind turbine on board, the WindRunner could officially become the largest plane by length and cargo volume. Read more from The Sun's coverage of Radia.
The Wall Street Journal covers Radia, the unicorn startup that plans to use rocket science to overcome one of the wind power industry’s biggest hurdles with a giant cargo plane. (Subscription required.)