Radia CEO’s Business Case for WindRunner Cargo Concept

Two years after emerging at the Farnborough International Airshow with a hugely ambitious air transport concept, Colorado-based Radia has expanded its envisioned market beyond moving massive wind turbine components and now sees much broader applications for WindRunner.

Chief executive Mark Lundstrom is positioning the four-engined heavy lift aircraft as a “platform to move the world’s biggest things to the hardest-to-reach places,” he told AIN during the show. Anything handled by an Antonov An-124 would fit inside the WindRunner, with far more volume to spare: “Take that and multiply it by seven.”

The original mission of moving skyscraper-sized wind turbine blades remains intact. Wind power structures, commercial cargo, and military equipment are all considered potential payloads for the 356-foot-long freighter. Radia advertises an estimated range of 2,000 km (1,200 miles) while hauling a maximum payload of about 160,000 pounds.

WindRunner’s design calls for an ultra-high-volume cargo hold capable of moving the world’s largest rockets—except for SpaceX’s super heavy Starship rocket—or at least four Lockheed Martin F-16s and six Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters lined up nose to tail.

“We’ve been getting a lot of interest from the military on things like moving six packs of Chinooks,” Lundstrom said. “Today, when you move a Chinook, you have to take the blades off and the rotors off, and it takes the better part of a week or 10 days with a bunch of people and a bunch of tools in a forward-deployed theater.”

WindRunner would be large enough to move CH-47s without requiring disassembly. On the commercial side, another potential application for the heavy-lift aircraft is moving latest-generation widebody turbofans produced by GE Aerospace and Rolls-Royce, which must be taken apart for transportation and reassembled upon delivery.

“And then imagine the engines they want to make next: The [Rolls-Royce] Ultrafan will be much bigger, and they will have to be completely modularized. WindRunner will move them all at once,” he said.

How much demand exists for such a freighter is an open question. In the program’s favor is a plan to lean on the existing supply chain, using off-the-shelf, in-production turbofans, an all-aluminum fuselage, and a mostly composite wing structure. Unlike some moonshot aircraft development programs, Radia is not counting on radically new airframe or engine designs to reach market. In the view of some industry analysts, there is nothing groundbreaking about the slow-moving cargo jet aside from its sheer size.

Lundstrom argues that the program’s success will hinge on execution, rather than developing novel technology or manufacturing processes.

“There’s no new technology here that needs to be proven out; the components are all things in mass production,” he said. “The structure is just huge, but the processes to build that structure have been well-honed over decades. I don’t view it as a technology risk.”

Radia will pursue Part 25 FAA certification with a small fleet of test aircraft that will eventually enter commercial service in the company’s self-operated fleet. It intends to begin assembly of the first aircraft in 2029 and to launch test flights the following year.

Lundstrom anticipates excitement from plane-spotters when the supermassive freighter does get airborne. “It’s going to be fantastic at an upcoming air show, right? Imagine when we fly at minimum viable airspeed…it will look like it’s floating.”