Windrunner: Why there won’t be a scale prototype for the world’s biggest aircraft
Six times the cargo volume of the An-225, a cockpit as high as a five-storey building, and as long as a football field, the Windrunner under development by Radia is the first outsize cargo aircraft to be designed since the 1980s.
Radia is not doing things by halves. This is an aircraft that’s been designed to carry the very largest items to the most difficult locations with ease.
“The goal is quite simply to move big things to pieces of dirt around the world,” Mark Lundstrom, Radia CEO, tells AGN on the sidelines of the Paris Air Show.
Normally, when a clean sheet aircraft is designed by a startup, a scale prototype will be flown to validate the flight characteristics and other elements of the design. From the Airbus MAVERIC to Archer’s Maker, when an aircraft looks a bit different from the norm, a subscale demonstrator is often a useful validation tool.
But despite the (literally) immense challenge of building the Windrunner, Radia is not planning to fly a prototype at any stage of the process.
Why the Windrunner won’t be prototyped
As we talked through the flight testing roadmap, the CEO clarified that the first and only thing they will build will be the aircraft itself, all 108 metres of it.
Make no mistake, this aircraft is immense. Its cargo volume is nine times bigger than an Antonov An-124, eight times bigger than a C-5 Super Galaxy and a staggering 12 times more capacious than a Boeing 747.
The graphics below visualise the sheer size of the Windrunner against the An-124 and 747.
The monstrous size of this aircraft is part of the reason it’s not going to have a scale prototype..
“The only thing that’s new is the size,” explains Lundstrom. “You can’t really prototype size.”
The magic of the Windrunner development process is Radia’s decision to use off-the-shelf, already certified products and components in the building of the aircraft. Designing the jet with Tier 1 components helps smooth the certification journey by leveraging already-proven technologies.
“Most of the time that you run into big challenges in the certification process, it’s because you put new technologies on an aircraft,” Lundstrom says. “The technologies that we’re using have all been flying for many years. We’re just putting things together in a new way.”
Of course, testing the design aerodynamically is still required. Radia has already completed extensive wind tunnel testing and computer modelling. The aircraft has been validated over nine years of research, all of which was kept under wraps until last year.
“We would prototype it if there was some technology risk that had to be reduced,” Lundstrom adds. ” But there’s not really new technology risk here.”
Why the world needs the Radia Windrunner
The Windrunner concept centres around better transportation of wind turbine blades, which are already some 70 metres or 230 feet in length.
They’re currently moved by road, and require extensive route planning and civil works that can include tree removal, sign displacement and construction of temporary roads.
Next generation blades are anticipated to be 100 metres in length, making terrestrial transport impossible. Port-to-port maritime transport remains an option, but the last mile connection to the wind farm site remains a challenge.
Radia’s Windrunner has been designed to provide faster, cheaper and easier transportation of such items, although the use case for a giant heavy lift aircraft is growing by the day.
Military applications of the Windrunner
Stagnation in the development of successors to large cargo aircraft like the An-124 and military transporters like the C-17 and C-5 has led to a pressing need for a new outsize aircraft.
The recently released ReArm Europe initiative emphasises the urgent need to strengthen strategic transport capabilities. That strategy specifically mentions strategic airlift.
In the US, Boeing is exploring a restart of the C‑17 Globemaster III production line a decade after the final aircraft rolled out in November 2015. Although talks are at very early stages, Shepherd Media reports discussions are ongoing with at least one European country.
Globally, there is a rising demand for strategic airlift capability, and Radia is hoping to plug that gap with an aircraft that can do everything the C-17 can, and much more.
“The military market now is growing rather quickly, and there are no other options for strategic airlift that could be available anytime soon,” Lundstrom explains.
“It takes the better part of 10 or 15 years to make a new big aircraft. So we’re probably a decade ahead of this process.”
Radia is targeting the completion of the first Windrunner in mid-2028, followed by flight testing, and a full entry to service before the end of the decade.
“There’s a massive gap in strategic airlift because nobody’s made a big plane for decades.” Lundstrom concludes. “There’s a good dual use opportunity between the energy industry, commercial cargo, and defence.
“The most important thing is this is the quickest way to get new heavy lift capabilities by 2030. It might be the only way.”
I asked Lundstrom whether anything was concerning him about building an aircraft of this size.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m concerned about being able to build enough to support the demand in the world.”
