Move over, Mriya – the new contender for world’s biggest plane

Despite its massive size, the plane will require only a 6,000-foot semi-prepared dirt or gravel landing strip at a wind farm, the firm says, meaning it can land at “almost any commercial airport around the world” as well. Loaded and unloaded via the WindRunner’s nose cargo door, the wind turbine blades of up to 105 metres in length will be carried directly to wind farm sites, removing a major barrier to onshore wind generation, said Radia CEO Mark Lundstrom.

“Offshore turbines are more than two times as powerful as onshore turbines because they are bigger,” he said. “If we could move these large turbines onshore, they would be twice as profitable and open up three times more land for economically viable wind farms. Why not put them onshore? Because literal roadblocks stand in the way. Radia will respond by building WindRunner to overcome these barriers, bring the benefits of offshore wind onshore, and deliver what we call GigaWind – the largest land-based turbines today and the even larger ones of the future.”

This will mean “highly efficient wind energy at enormous scale”, said Lundstrom. “From a business perspective that means that the onshore wind industry’s internal rate of return will double, attracting much more capital to renewables.

“From an energy security and environmental perspective, it means lowest cost clean energy to power the grid, to power commercial applications such as data centres and hard-to-decarbonise industries such as steelmaking, and to generate green molecules – green hydrogen, green ammonia and sustainable aviation fuel. GigaWind will allow us to reduce cost and increase generation consistency, resulting in as much as a 35 per cent cost reduction – which in turn will help the world to meet its decarbonisation targets,” he said.

Radia expects the WindRunner to be up and running by 2027 and says it “is more than halfway through the time required to design, build and certify an aircraft”.