Windrunner-Enormous cargo aircraft project with rough field capability

[PR19_Kit]

It'd be the opposite of what my first gliding instructor told me......

He said 'If you push the stick forward the aeroplane will go down. Conversely if you pull the stick back the aeroplane will go down.......................' 

[The Rat]

Hmmm, it starts off by saying that the road infrastructure isn't large enough for moving these blades from factory to the turbine site, and then proposes they use the plane to fly them there.

Fine, but how do they get the blade from the landing site to the turbine site?

As usual they've not thought it through?

See them all the time travelling by road through the Toronto area, both blades and pylons.. The routes are planned out in advance, with consideration given to low bridges, overhead power lines, tight turns, etc. So I don't know which road infrastructure they're challenged with, but a lot of our rural areas were built a century ago. Plug these coordinates into Google maps and you'll see wind turbines in Ontario, and the dirt roads, with right-angle turns, that were used to get them there.

44.08634438072385, -80.2581472462864

[Rheged]

Might an "Airlander" be a better carrier of turbine blades?  It does not require any runway at all!

[Rick Lowe]

With all the trouble they're having with older 3D printed stuff turning to mush, I don't want to think of what would happen with a blade turning at speed... 

[Weaver]

I don't know about the wind turbine business, but they make a good case in the military section for a new airlifter. The C-17 ended production in 2015, the C-5s can't go on forever, and the A400M is good, but smaller. I've been saying for years now that the solution to air-portable armour isn't to compromise the vehicle's fighting abilities by trying to cram it through the bottleneck of a C-130's cargo hold cross-section, it's to make a bigger C-130. Granted I didn't have something THIS big in mind, but their point is stil well-made: most current transport planes run out of space before they run out of room. There's an increasing need for lower-density deployable systems like SAMs, radars and tactical SSMs. Yes, you can break them down into sections to fit in smaller aircraft, but that then imposes a delay in getting them assembled again, plus you need somewhere safe to do it, and if that site's far from the battlefield you then have to transport them there by road. Rolling out of the cargo bay ready-to-fight at an austere forward strip is definitely an advantage.

The thing they don't explain with the Windrunner, as far as I can see, is how it's getting away with such a relatively short wing. Is it fully blown or something like that? I didn't notice a pic that even showed the flap configuration, let alone any more detail.

[Mossie]

Remote location?  Land on site.

And if it's out in the middle of the sea?

That's what this beastie is for:

You cannot view this attachment.

[Mossie]

With all the trouble they're having with older 3D printed stuff turning to mush, I don't want to think of what would happen with a blade turning at speed... 

Airlander 50 might, if it ever gets built. Airlander 10's in service date seems to continually slip backwards.
It could carry several underslung, with the issues Jon mentioned.

[jcf]

I don't know about the wind turbine business, but they make a good case in the military section for a new airlifter. The C-17 ended production in 2015, the C-5s can't go on forever, and the A400M is good, but smaller. I've been saying for years now that the solution to air-portable armour isn't to compromise the vehicle's fighting abilities by trying to cram it through the bottleneck of a C-130's cargo hold cross-section, it's to make a bigger C-130. Granted I didn't have something THIS big in mind, but their point is stil well-made: most current transport planes run out of space before they run out of room. There's an increasing need for lower-density deployable systems like SAMs, radars and tactical SSMs. Yes, you can break them down into sections to fit in smaller aircraft, but that then imposes a delay in getting them assembled again, plus you need somewhere safe to do it, and if that site's far from the battlefield you then have to transport them there by road. Rolling out of the cargo bay ready-to-fight at an austere forward strip is definitely an advantage.

The thing they don't explain with the Windrunner, as far as I can see, is how it's getting away with such a relatively short wing. Is it fully blown or something like that? I didn't notice a pic that even showed the flap configuration, let alone any more detail.

If you notice they only show it landing
in a flat, desert like area.

The other issue is that they keep harping on volume and underplay payload weight. It's max payload weight is less than a C-17's.

[Weaver]

I don't know about the wind turbine business, but they make a good case in the military section for a new airlifter. The C-17 ended production in 2015, the C-5s can't go on forever, and the A400M is good, but smaller. I've been saying for years now that the solution to air-portable armour isn't to compromise the vehicle's fighting abilities by trying to cram it through the bottleneck of a C-130's cargo hold cross-section, it's to make a bigger C-130. Granted I didn't have something THIS big in mind, but their point is stil well-made: most current transport planes run out of space before they run out of room. There's an increasing need for lower-density deployable systems like SAMs, radars and tactical SSMs. Yes, you can break them down into sections to fit in smaller aircraft, but that then imposes a delay in getting them assembled again, plus you need somewhere safe to do it, and if that site's far from the battlefield you then have to transport them there by road. Rolling out of the cargo bay ready-to-fight at an austere forward strip is definitely an advantage.

The thing they don't explain with the Windrunner, as far as I can see, is how it's getting away with such a relatively short wing. Is it fully blown or something like that? I didn't notice a pic that even showed the flap configuration, let alone any more detail.

If you notice they only show it landing
in a flat, desert like area.

The other issue is that they keep harping on volume and underplay payload weight. It's max payload weight is less than a C-17's.

Yep, you need the right balance between volume and weight. Most of the current airlifters err too much on the side of weight. It looks like Windrunner perhaps errs too much on the side of volume, at least as it stands at the moment. It's obvious that they've sized it for the wind turbine use-case and then gone looking for other applications, with a military contract being the obvious big, rich prize. Nevertheless, the general arguments they make are valid, even if their own product isn't the ideal answer to them. You might imagine a military airlifter version having the opposite evolution to most airliners, in that it would have a couple of fuselage sections taken out in order to more perfectly balance volume vs weight. Another critical constraint on military airlifters is payload bay cross-section, and there it scores heavily.