Essay by Eric Worrall
Humans might face future air travel restrictions, but wind turbines could get a free pass if inventor Mark Lundstrom has his way.
How a Giant Aircraft could Ease Clean Energy Supply Chains
By Charlie King
October 17, 2025Radia’s WindRunner aircraft could redesign how wind turbine blades and oversized cargo reach remote areas, bypassing outdated road infrastructure limits
The infrastructure supporting global ground transport serves daily traffic but struggles with oversized cargo. Supply chains across the world face increasing pressure as the scale of renewable energy components expands. Wind turbines in particular present a challenge due to their sheer size and the limitations of existing logistics networks.
Radia, founded in 2016 by aerospace engineer Mark Lundstrom, sets out to change this with its WindRunner aircraft. Designed to transport the world’s largest wind turbine blades, WindRunner reaches areas that roads and railways cannot access. Traditional infrastructure can move blades around 70 metres long, but the next generation of turbines requires blades exceeding 100 metres. This creates a need to rethink how energy projects move their largest parts.
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“Big Western wind turbine makers need direct financial support to make the investments needed to aid decarbonisation,” says Tim Dawidowsky, Chief Operating Officer of Siemens Gamesa. “The supply chain is facing substantial challenges that could limit production capacity and increase turbine prices.”
Read more: https://sustainabilitymag.com/news/windrunner-how-a-giant-aircraft-ease-clean-energy-supply-chains
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A promo video of the new aircraft;
As far as I can tell the aircraft hasn’t been built yet, they’re looking for funding.
Building an aircraft that size which can land on rough runways shall be, how can I put it, challenging.
I’m no aircraft engineer but I’ve flown light aircraft before. Hitting even a small bump at speed can flex the entire airframe. Large aircraft can have big fluffy wheels and long shock absorber assemblies which can help reduce the peak force inflicted by impacts on bumps, but large and long airframe structures are also more vulnerable to stress. If the front wheels of a 70m+ aircraft hit a bump which isn’t fully absorbed by the wheels and shock absorber assembly, 70m is a lot of leverage. Any slight flaw in the design and even a small bump could result in thousands of tons of force being exerted on components which aren’t designed to take such punishment.
It is just barely possible to build aircraft this large. Ukraine owned the world’s only Antonov An-225 Mriya until it was destroyed during the Russian invasion. The Antonov could carry a 70m cargo. But Ukraine’s ex-soviet airplane required a paved runway over two miles long to get airborne.
The ex-Soviet Antonov An-225 Mriya aircraft cost around $300 million to build. I find it difficult to imagine anyone landing a commercial aircraft which costs a third of a billion dollars on a dirt track.
Who still believes wind is the cheapest form of energy? Now all the easy wind locations have been taken, wind now apparently needs financial support to expand, for developing $300 million airplanes intended to be landed on dirt tracks in the middle of nowhere. The cost of wind power just got even more absurd than before.
With insanity you have to go the whole way. Now imaging that land waste don wind turbines to build some high quality housing that solves an actually real life problem.
Regarding the plane for hauling wind turbine blades, such a plane would cost at least $500 million, about 10 would be required to cover new construction and replacements.
The blades would be transported with special equipment from airports to offshore sites
The whole concept is beyond lubricous.
The planes would last about 20 years.
Will the worn out blades be stored in Antarctica, in Siberia, the Sahara Desert, or sunk in the depths of Oceans, to serve for future generations to abhor in disbelief?
The video is insane
It looks like something Al Gore would come up with!
Just think. If Biden’s word salad machine VP won the election, they would have thrown billions in taxpayer money at this stupidity, and even if they managed to build it, it probably would break its worse-than-useless cargo into 15 pieces when it landed on some remote and rough runway.
Whoops! Nothing to see here, as long as the Democrat donors are hapoy!
And the European moneyed and political elites would have been laughing al the way to the bank, because they would have succeeded making electricity costs, c/kWh, much higher in the US, and making the US even less competitive in world markets. See my above comments
THE US HAS LOPSIDED TRADE AGREEMENTS WITH ALMOST ALL “TRADING PARTNERS”
https://willempost.substack.com/p/the-us-has-lopsided-trade-agreements?r=1n3sit&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
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Before NAFTA, Canada and Mexico always had annual trade deficits with the US
After NAFTA:
1) Canada and Mexico, with investments by European and Asian companies, have huge DUTY-FREE annual trade surpluses with the US.
2) Foreign (and US) companies shipped parts to Mexico and assembled cars, with their entire production shipped DUTY-FREE into the US.
That is Trojan Horse exploitation that is sucking wealth/jobs from the US.
3) Dutch companies shipped automated greenhouses, the size of airplane hangars, to Canada (which provides almost- free gas and electricity as an incentive), with almost their entire production shipped DUTY-FREE into the US.
That is Trojan Horse exploitation that is sucking wealth/jobs from the US
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Dutch/Belgian conglomerates own more than 50% of the food supermarkets on the US East Coast.
Aldi, a German company had 2559 US food supermarkets in July, 2025, also owns Trader Joe’s with 608 stores.
That means plenty of permanent shelf space for European farm goods to the disadvantage of US farmers.
Europe has been doing this since the disastrous 1960s Kennedy Round, which lowered tariffs for European goods without the US getting any lower tariffs and lower non-tariff barriers from Europe.
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On July 1, 2020, NAFTA was replaced by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)
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Free Trade?
Japan has a 700% tariff on US rice. India 100%.
Egypt 65% average tariff on all US goods.
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On quantities in excess of quota, Canadian tariffs on US dairy products are: Milk up to 243%. Butter up to 298%, Cheese up to 245%. This screws US farmers, already for decades.
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Living in Vermont, we buy, throughout the year, electricity (GMP, Canada), propane (IRVING, Canada), gasoline (IRVING, Canada), and vegetables and flowers (Hanneford, Dutch/Belgium)
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Perot, a Texas businessman, predicted NAFTA would be sucking tens of $billions of wealth and millions of jobs out of the US. Deluded, brainwashed Americans laughed at Perot at that time.
CBS News “reported” 70,500 American factories (millions of jobs lost) have closed since the start of NAFTA
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Trump is doing the right thing with tariffs to increase US production of goods and services for domestic use and export,
that will employ tens of millions of workers, build strong families and communities, and will reduce imports of goods and services, and will transform decades of wealth/job-sucking trade deficits into trade surpluses to MAGA
German Economist: Trump Tariffs are Saving the US
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/german-economist-trump-tariffs-saving-us
In the 60’s to transport moving oversize cargo to a launch site, NASA built The Super Guppy
It has quite a history. See https://www.nasa.gov/specials/jsc-aircraft-ops/guppy.html
Aircraft SpecificationsGeneral characteristics
Performance
NASA 941 Specifics
Yes but in this case, the cargo is completely unnecessary and therefore not a nickel of taxpayer money should be spent on any method of transporting it.
Exactly!!!
Pfffft, what a failure of imagination.
What you really need, is a helicopter-like vehicle which is the top of the wind turbine. Then all you have to do is assemble it at the factory, it takes off and flies to the wind turbine tower, and lands on it. No need for oversized planes or runways. Might need a jet engine for the tail rotor though…
Hush. Too much money spent on WTGs already.
Let’s not throw good money after bad.
There is no way the airplane in those images could climb above ground effect. Might not even get off the ground. It would need a much larger wing, even without payload. Land on rough runways? Fuggedaboutit.
It is the least expensive form of energy, as long as you want to use it within a few miles of the location, otherwise building transmission lines from such locations adds up quickly.
These idiots would have invented plywood to build the Egyptian pyramids….