Turnbull-linked company wants to deliver wind turbine blades in the world’s biggest plane. Can it be done?

A team of aerospace and energy experts is looking to the skies to help solve one of the major issues confronting the wind industry – how to overcome the logistical and cost nightmare of getting oversized turbine parts from factory to port, and then to project site.

Colorado-based Radia, whose team of advisors includes former US secretary of energy Ernest Moniz and former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, wants to build the world’s largest aircraft that will be able to transport oversize cargo like 100 metre-long wind turbine blades.

It also needs to be nimble enough to land on short dirt air strips – the sort that might already exist at wind farms.

The plane, dubbed the WindRunner, is penciled in for first flight in late 2029, but to get a toehold in Australia CEO Mark Lundstrom will need to convince sceptical local developers that it’s a viable alternative to increasingly tricky road transport.

Moving wind turbines around Australia is becoming more difficult, as Renew Economy reported last week.

Nearly every port has an underpass to navigate on the way out, states have wildly inconsistent rules around how massive pieces of equipment are allowed to be transported, and transport engineers have to become more crafty in how they take bigger and bigger pieces through the same sized roads. 

The planning to transport turbine parts from port to site starts five years before construction starts, and comes at a cost of $500,000 to $1 million-plus cost per turbine.

It means that shipping these pieces by air, especially if the aircraft can land on a dirt airstrip next to where the turbines will go up as Lundstrom says the Windrunner will be able to, is, on paper at least, an interesting idea. 

“The challenge is logistics. You simply can’t move objects that are over 100 meters long and and seven meters wide onshore because of road hardness, bridge heights, road curvature, tunnel widths, whatever,” Lundstrom tells Renew Economy.

“Wind energy is hamstrung, unless you can figure out how to airlift these gigantic objects to dirt strips.”

A render of the Windrunner aircraft. Image: Radia

Lundstrom’s pitch is that wind needs to go big with the kind of 10 megawatt (MW) turbines unveiled in China in 2023. It’s a story likely to tickle Australian developers, who are always ready to upsize their turbines.

His point is that 10 MW turbines make locations with wind speeds of 7-8 metres/second financially viable, and the 20 per cent improvement in capacity factor means big reductions in electricity costs and grid carbon emissions, and improved project profitability, according to data from a study the company commissioned.

But experts in Australia are yet to be convinced that airlifts are the answer, after all, they’ve already been sold the airship dream. 

Blade expert Rosemary Barnes says air transport could be feasible in Australia, but that will depend on whether a particular site is impossible to access by road. 

And while the idea would be perfect to beat 2025 challenges, by 2035 other technological work arounds, such as using the self-lifting Nabralift towers or split blade designs, might beat air transport on cost. 

Barnes also warns that massive blades come with far more defects which when in remote sites comes with a big maintenance and remediation cost.

Issues raised by other people working in the wind industry include the likely cost of air lifting, the fact that you’d still need to get the parts from the port to an airport which would add to the handling costs and not deal with the fact that most obstacles are within 20km of the port, and the prospect of swapping in Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) approvals for state transport requirements to build a temporary airstrip near a site.

The Lego plane

Lundstrom founded the company in 2016 to find a way to airlift bigger and longer onshore turbine blades from port to site.

Since then has been working through all of the permutations of what that could look like, crossing airships and giant helicopters from the list of options before settling on a fixed-wing plane that uses off-the-shelf components to keep the price down.

Lundstrom says using parts manufacturers are already making will keep the cost of construction in the single-digit billions, and has convinced suppliers to work with a startup that had never built an aircraft. 

What it came up with is the Windrunner, a rectangle with wings and a tail and which looks like it was designed by Lego. 

A render of the Windrunner aircraft. Image: Radia

It’s a 108m long, four-engine cargo plane with an 80m wingspan. The top is three-stories above the ground and it’s capable of landing on a dirt airstrip just 1.8km long. When fully loaded with three 80m blades, two 95m blades or a single 105m blade, it will have a range of 2000km.

Enormous aircraft have been built before. 

Ukraine’s six-engine Antonov An-225 Mriya was the largest aircraft on earth until it, the only one of its kind ever made, was destroyed by Russian bombs in 2022. The Boeing C-17 Globemaster, the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and the Antonov An-124 Ruslan are no longer being made and either old or unavailable for global heavy air transport.

Another possible pressure point for the Windrunner story is the news that Boeing might restart production of the C-17, a decade after it stopped production on cost and a lack of orders. 

Radia appears to have sourced the billions it needs to build the Windrunner however, by selling the aircraft as a military transport. 

“A majority of the funding we anticipate coming from government support,” Lundstrom says. 

“The dual use of this aircraft means that on the energy transition side, we can rely on some amount of government support, including military, in order to get this funded. 

“If you’re going to make a new C-17, in today’s dollars it would be more than $75 billion… we can do that for less than 10 per cent [of that cost] and we could do it 15 years earlier.”

Must be able to rough it

If being able to carry very long things was requirement number one, being able to do it while landing and taking off from a makeshift airstrip was the other: it had to be dirt and it had to be short. 

Radia’s engineers designed a plane that could do that, using a number of “tricks in the trade” to allow an aircraft the length of a soccer field to land and take off in just 1km.

Passenger aircraft have wings that sweep backwards to reduce drag, but the Windrunner has a straight wing that gives it a landing speed of 100 knots, slightly faster than a Cessna.

The fuselage is made of aluminium “because if you get a ding, you can bang it out” unlike composite materials.

“The wings are composite, but the wings are more than three stories off the ground. The wings don’t see a lot of foreign debris that gets kicked up so the wings and the engines are far enough off the ground that you don’t have to worry about that,” Lundstrom says.

“We just have to worry about the fuselage being robust enough that we can deal with a moderate amount of churn when we’re landing and taking off.”

Lundstrom says 80 per cent of the parts suppliers “by value” have been signed up and made public, but the name of the all-important engine manufacturer is still under wraps.

He expects to start building the factory in 2026 and have a plane in the air in 2029 for the first trial flights, followed by certification by the US Federal Aviation Association (FAA) within one to two years. 

The FAA itself says certification for a new aircraft design takes five to nine years, but Lundstrom says they’re already working with the organisation – and also snagged as head of regulatory affairs the man who was heading up the exact area of the FAA that will be certifying the Windrunner.

It means that if the Windrunner is built to Lundstrom’s timeline, the aircraft could be doing its first commercial runs in 2031.

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