hen it takes to the skies, the Radia WindRunner will be the world’s largest cargo plane. The entrepreneurs behind Radia created it for one reason: to facilitate the shipping of gigantic wind blades to challenging locations.
As fascinating as it is, what’s most interesting about Radia to me isn’t the aircraft itself. Indeed, founder and CEO Mark Lundstrom told me over coffee that he directed the company’s engineers to follow the mantra of “do nothing new.” The plane is built using existing technologies to ease the engineering and subsequent certification process., says Lundstrom. Its fleet of cargo planes will simply give it a strategic advantage.
In time, other competitor airplanes may enter the market, but Radia has a head start. The company operated in stealth mode for seven years, raising venture capital money, getting the engineering right on the plane, and collaborating with launch partners, before revealing the WindRunner in late March. Eventually, Lundstrom says, the company could have hundreds of planes crisscrossing the skies. “We will get a head start and be able to enjoy those initial economics,” says Lundstrom.
Radia is a great example of how an innovation can totally shift the landscape of an existing market. When it comes to wind energy, bigger blades are better than their smaller counterparts. Larger wind turbines can work in a wider range of conditions, meaning they have less down time than their smaller counterparts. But the biggest wind turbines are as long as a football field and simply too big to be transported to the fields and deserts where they are typically installed.
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