THE world’s biggest plane dubbed “Skytanic” will finally take to the skies by 2030 and begin transporting its enormous cargo.
Officially called WindRunner, the colossal aircraft will be able to carry 12-times more than a Boeing 747 – and has one very specific purpose.
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WindRunner will clock in at an incredible 356ft – longer than the pitch at Wembley – and will be 79ft tall.
The company behind it, Radia, has already been working on the plans for almost a decade.
While it will be a versatile vehicle, the size and shape of WindRunner have been carefully designed to accommodate one specific item: wind turbines.
Wind turbine blades are enormous and incredibly tricky to transport on roads, and normal planes are too small to handle them.
Some turbine projects have even needed special roads to be laid to get the blades there.
And the blades are expected to get even bigger in the future – possibly growing from 230ft to 330ft.
So, with the help of rocket scientist CEO Mark Lundstrom, the Radia team looked for a solution.
WindRunner will be able to carry whole blades in its cargo space, and fly them right to the construction site.
To make landing easier, the plane has been designed so that it can touch down on short, dirt runways – rather than requiring a fully operational airport.
Radia said: “WindRunner’s unique capabilities not only allow it to meet the requirements of today’s airlift missions but also allow it to open the aperture of what is possible to move by air.”
Radia hopes to have WindRunner in the skies by 2030.
When it takes off for the first time, it will be the biggest-ever plane to do so.
The second-largest was a Ukrainian jet called Mriya, meaning “the dream”, which was destroyed by Russia at the beginning of its invasion.
And WindRunner will have uses beyond just transporting wind turbine blades – opening up new transport opportunities to industries from business to defence.
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CEO Lundstrom said: “There’s an entire other classification of big things that have not yet been invented.
“The engineers of the world, and the product development people of the world, don’t even try to invent bigger things if they know that they can never be transported.”
THE POWER OF WIND TURBINES
Offshore wind turbine blades are among the world’s longest items, and, currently, the largest of them can only be transported by enormous boats.
The blades are made of fibreglass-reinforced polyester or epoxy which, in such large quantities, weighs an awful lot.
The heaviest blades can come in at a staggering 26,000kg.
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With the WindRunner’s unprecedented size, engineers will be able to build even bigger.
These longer blades could produce double the amount of energy current onshore installations can snf reduce energy costs by 35 per cent, Radia estimates.
It also forecasts that the larger blades would increase the power consistency by up to 20 percent – a key metric for the reliability of wind-farm energy.
