Design This Day | Episode 12

Building the world’s largest aircraft

Bruno Bachinger joins Teague Futurist Devin Liddell to talk about building the world’s largest aircraft, designing at an unprecedented scale, and how heavy-lift logistics could transform multiple industries. Bruno is the Chief Engineer at Radia. He previously spent more than 20 years at Boeing and led flight physics at an eVTOL startup.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
Not only can we carry a lot of these things, but we can carry them fully assembled. And what that means is, when these assets roll off of Windrunner, they roll off mission ready. On the space side, we can carry entire rocket systems in the fuselage, fully assembled. That's a paradigm shift, right where they can take a Vulcan rocket or one of SpaceX's Falcon 9s and put it in the cargo bay and fly it to its destination. And so the productivity there, what used to take weeks we can do in hours or days.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Welcome to Design This Day, a podcast about the future, the futures we want and the people working right now to make those futures real. I'm your host Devin Liddell. I'm a futurist at Teague. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the gap between present challenges and future solutions.

Today I'm speaking with Bruno Bachinger, chief engineer at Radia. Radia is a startup building the world's largest aircraft. This airplane will be 10 times bigger than a commercial jetliner with a cargo capacity that pushes what we think is possible in flight. Bruno brings decades of aerospace experience to the table, including more than 20 years at Boeing. He then led a flight physics team at an eVTOL startup in Silicon Valley, helping turn early stage ideas into working aircraft. In this episode, Bruno explains how prioritizing heavy lift logistics could open up possibilities for renewable energy, defense space, and humanitarian work. Plus, we explore why design decisions, not new technologies, connect as the real engines of innovation. But first, let's hear about how this idea got off the ground.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
All ideas seem a little crazy at first, and they're crazy until they're not. To a certain extent, these ideas require some faith, they require belief, they require some optimism for the what is, no kidding, a long path ahead. This is a decade plus long proposition that cost billions of dollars. We're not shying away from that. And sure if you go out there and read some of the responses on some of the social media, there are skeptics out there. Of course there are. But my view is that good ideas, if they're really a good idea, will always find a way.

Devin Liddell:                          
For anyone building new technology, winning over investors is often one of the biggest challenges. Bold ideas can lead to raised eyebrows and long meetings where you have to defend the sanity of the vision. Bruno is no stranger to that, but at Radia the dynamic felt different from the start. Radia is building an airplane so big, it would stretch the length of a football field. But instead of endless skepticism, investors seem to understand the business case straight away. That's because this aircraft addresses a growing problem in the wind energy industry. To generate more energy, wind turbines are getting bigger and bigger. So big, the blades, some as tall as the Eiffel Tower, can't be transported by truck or fit into existing cargo planes. So to transport the next generation of wind turbine blades, the industry needs something entirely new, a massive aircraft that is also rugged enough to land on unpaved runways adjacent to remote installation sites.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
It is a big program. I don't want to imply there's no risk here. Of course the airplane programs are hard and we've got to go execute. But in terms of laying out the story in terms of does it make sense? Does the business case close? Is there a risk that's tolerable? Those are much easier conversations to have than say in other environments that I've been in. For those that have actually spent the effort to marinate in the idea to understand what we're doing, the response has been majority supportive in understanding. We've raised about $150 million so far, and then we're in substantive discussions now to raise billions of dollars, and it's through government support and commercial partnerships. So if you use the old statement that people vote with their checkbook, the votes look pretty positive.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Bruno's team is already working with Radia's future customers to design the plane they will eventually use. It's a highly technical task that wouldn't be possible without this kind of trust and collaboration.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
We have letters intents with the vast majority of them. A lot of the work we've been doing trying to understand the wind turbine payloads that we need the airplane to be designed around has been done in collaboration with them. So we understand physical limitations and requirements for the things we're going to be carrying, not just of today, but the ones tomorrow, right? We're trying to design the airplane not for the wind turbines that they're coming off the line today, but the ones that are going to produce for tomorrow. They're supportive, so to me that's encouraging.

Devin Liddell:                                         
It's an enormous project. And even Bruno has had moments where he's had to steady himself.

Bruno Bachinger:
Everybody's human. Even for me, there's, I don't know, occasional moments of doubt and recognition of the enormity of the task ahead of us, right? This multi-billion dollar airplane program. It'd be inhuman not to have those moments, but you just break big things into little things, right? And as the old saying goes, you can't eat a whole elephant in one bite. We spent a lot of time doing what I would say is proper due diligence at Radia, trying to understand the plan. How are we going to eat that whole elephant? How are we going to go about get the funding? How are we going to do the engineering? What engineering makes sense? What team do we need? Who are the appropriate suppliers and partners that we need to bring on board, etc. I think obviously we have a lot of work to do.

Everybody's human. Even for me, there's occasional moments of doubt and recognition of the enormity of the task ahead of us... but you just break big things into little things.

There's that famous quote by, I think he's a navy Admiral, but his name is William McRaven. He gave a commencement speech at one of the universities, I don't remember which one. But in his message there, one of his key assertions was, if nothing else, just start by making your bed every day. Get up and make your bed. The whole concept here is, it's around the importance of just getting started. No matter how small the activity is, it gets you moving, it builds momentum, gives you the momentum to take on the next thing. And after a while you see progress and starts building a bit of pride, and then progress happens. That's how I face the enormity of this is, go do the work. That's the ethos that Radia has been built on. We've got the team, we've got a good plan and I think we've got a really solid engineering product. Now we just got to go deliver.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Bruno's experience is a reminder that breakthrough design doesn't always start with a shiny new technology. It often starts with a real problem to solve. Radia listened to what the wind industry was saying, they were running up against the limits of today's transportation infrastructure. What sounds like an outlandish idea, building a giant airplane, five stories tall and a length of a city block, is actually a practical response to an urgent need. It's a straightforward model for innovation. Start with a problem, build with your partners, and let each small deliberate step redefine what is possible.
                                                      
Radia named its aircraft Windrunner, a nod to the industry that made the project possible. But Windrunner's oversized cargo capacity and its ability to land on rough terrain opens up possibilities far beyond wind energy.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
There are a number of really interesting applications. So let's start with defense. C-5s, they're really showing their age. We have some data that says that C-5s now are less than 50% mission ready. They're dispatch reliability is 47%, so that means they're more often not able to fly than they are able to fly. Then what's happening is, the military is being forced to utilize C-17s to kind of pick up the slack for missions that might've been accomplished by C-5s in the past. C-17s are wonderful airplanes and there's somewhere up, there's like 220 of them globally, but there just aren't enough of them. Now they're being over utilized because they're filling other gaps, so the life expecting those airplanes is going to come down.
                                                      
You're seeing some of these strategic planners looking out into the early 2030s saying, "What's going to be airlift solution? We don't have a solution to fill a gap." Our airplane, even though it's twice the size of a C-17, we carry about the same payload, but we have 12 times the volume, to kind of put that in context. One of the fundamental airplane trade-offs that we've made is, we compromise on some of our ability to carry mass, but it enables us to carry things that are unique. It's really suited to those things that are relatively large physically, but of medium density. They're not particularly heavy in a very concentrated way, so think of fighter jets, helicopters, launch rockets. We think, and we've gotten relatively good feedback so far, that Windrunner is really ideally suited to transport many of the defense and space assets. We can carry six Chinook helicopters fully assembled six of them, whereas a C-17 can carry two of them after disassembly.
                                                      
This is one of the key value propositions that we're trying to promote, is that not only can we carry a lot of these things, but we can carry them fully assembled. That's really important, because the vast majority of today's airlift capability for some of these larger assets like fighter jets, F-16s, F-35s, or Chinooks, etc., in order for them to be transported by air, they have to be disassembled to some degree to fit into a C-5 or C-17. So for example, most of the fighters, the wings have to be taken off. Many of the helicopters they have to take the rotor system off in order to fit in. So operationally what that means is, there can be sometimes a week or more of time on the front end to disassemble the airplane before transport, and then on the back end when you arrive your destination, they come off and then it takes another week to assemble them.
                                                      
So one of the big operational unlocks that Windrunner is offering is the ability to roll off mission ready. You basically roll it off the airplane, put some fuel on, it's ready to go. Then you couple that with the ability to land in austere environments, so mission ready into unique places that you weren't able to access before. Not only can you stage, but you can stage them to more forward locations if necessary, as an example. By the way, it's not just limited to the airframes, we can carry up to 12 heavy trucks. You can carry an entire THAAD missile system. So there's a lot of military assets that are sort of physically awkward that fit very well into our very large cargo bay.

One of the big operational unlocks that Windrunner is offering is the ability to roll off mission ready. You basically roll it off the airplane, put some fuel on, it's ready to go.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Bruno's team made a deliberate trade-off. Windrunner isn't built to carry the heaviest loads in the sky, but rather the largest. It's designed for cargo that's big, awkward, and hard to move any other way. And that kind of capacity caught the attention of the space industry.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
On the space side, we can carry entire rocket systems in the fuselage fully assembled. You can take an entire Ariane 6, or a Vulcan rocket, or one of SpaceX's Falcon 9s and put it in the cargo bay and flight to its destination. So the productivity there, what used to take weeks, we can do in hours or days. Or imagine a situation where on a recovery operation where you can have that thing back to its home site for refurbishment in hours rather than days or weeks.
                                                      
Another one that's probably maybe one of the most interesting is humanitarian responses. The ability to rapidly deliver mobile hospitals, entire aid packages, shelter in the event of environmental events or whatever. Wherever there's a humanitarian need, we can bring a lot of support very quickly and we can deliver it to more forward-based locations than maybe other assets can. So we have a lot of interesting discussions, for example, with NATO, they have a branch called SALIS where they retain contracts with heavy lift cargo airplanes in the event of emergencies for humanitarian response.

Devin Liddell:                                         
I love it. Well, and also I imagine that's entirely plausible that there are applications that will emerge in the decades ahead that maybe you haven't even anticipated.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
I think that's absolutely true, Devin. In fact, we were at the Paris Air Show earlier this year and already we had a booth and people would show up and say, "Hey, when is this thing ready? I've got this thing I need to carry." Somebody was mentioning, "Hey, what would be the plausibility of carrying trains, like maglev train cars?" So to your point, there's this idea, if there's the ability to carry things by air that we just can't today, there's probably applications that we haven't thought of.

Devin Liddell:                                         
The use cases for Windrunner are vast. It can transport everything from fighter jets to ready-made shelters. But the team didn't design a plane only for extremes, they wanted an aircraft that could also land at major airports across the world. Achieving that balance for a plane 10 times the size of a commercial jet required certain design choices, especially when it came to Windrunner's wingspan.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
We want to be able to land in all the same places that say an Airbus A380 or the Antonovs can land, so that does mean that we have to design to the same airport code constraints that they do. We do visually have this unique looking airplane where our fuselage is uncharacteristically long and our wingspan is artificially limited for these airport constraint purposes. So that does lead to a slightly different sort of design solution space. If you look at the airplane, some of the renderings of it, you'll probably note that the wing looks sort of short and stubby relative to maybe your typical mental model of an airplane looks like. A lot of people interpret that as, your wing is too small. And I can assure you that our wing is not too small. We have a wing that's slightly bigger than an airplane that carries twice our payload. The wing is huge. It's just that visually it looks a little different based on the constraints because of our scale.
                                                      
This is a scale driven thing. You run into these constraints where maybe other airplanes don't. It has a very unique look to it. It doesn't look like other airplanes out there. And if I were to assign a word to it is, its form follows function. What I really like about this airplane is it's utilitarian in the sense of every detail about it is there for a reason and it's about its function. So to me it's beautiful in the same way that an A-10 attack airplane is, it's an awkward looking airplane too, but it's so awkward looking that it's beautiful. But all of those design decisions convey information about what the airplane does. That's how I would summarize all these trades that we make. I think despite all the very necessary and productive creative friction that happens in our engineering activities, at the end of the day, what I can say is, is that we're all purpose-driven for the mission. What does this airplane need to do and what does the solution enables that mission? And that's liberating and it's also aligning.

Every detail about it is there for a reason and it's about its function... all of those design decisions convey information about what the airplane does.

Devin Liddell:                                         
I love that. Well, it's also interesting to imagine this critique of the wings being too stubby. The wings are too short. And at the same time, as you mentioned earlier, this is an aircraft that's actually capable of approach speeds that are extraordinarily slower than an aircraft that are similarly sized or sort of in that same class. I imagine when people observe this thing eventually it's going to be interesting to see their reactions to it.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
Yeah. If you were like me, the young kid at the end of a runway watching a 747 takeoff. This massive machine that takes off and it kind of looks like it's hanging in the air and you just sit there wondering how the heck does that thing fly? I think Windrunner is going to take that question and just multiply it by two kind of thing. It's going to be a beautiful sight.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Windrunner looks unlike any aircraft that's come before it. The surface area of its wings covers more ground than Bruno's first apartment and it needs 18 wheels just to land. By comparison, a Boeing 787, a wide body, has eight landing wheels. What makes Windrunner remarkable isn't new technology, it's design. The plane's proportions, its structure, its landing capabilities, they all come from design choices, not breakthroughs in materials or propulsion technology. In fact, that was the plan from the start.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
While our airplane is very much novel, a unique, it's not reliant on new technologies, and we're doing that very intentionally. In general, we're using design practices and componentry that's in service today, but we're obviously arranging those things in a new and novel way to create a new and novel product. The reason we're doing that is because it de-risks our program quite a bit. Technology development can be expensive, it can be long-standing, and it exposes you to risk if the technology doesn't pan out like you think. It also helps us with cost, but perhaps most importantly it's a speed-to-market enabler. We think the demand for this thing is such that it's important for us to have this thing out in the wild and through certification in the 2030s. And that's true for both wind and military applications. We're designing a low-to-no-technology-content airplane. But that doesn't mean that there aren't design challenges.

We're using design practices and componentry that's in service today, but we're obviously arranging those things in a new and novel way to create a new and novel product.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Well, and I'm curious on that front too, because you've taken on big audacious goals in the past in other places. So how would you say the culture of Radia is different from some of those other places you've been?

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
First of all, it's a startup culture, so there's a lot of pride in the sense of purpose. Everybody's there because they want to be there. We all have options and we all make a choice to take on a little bit of risk to join a startup. You don't have the stability that maybe you have joining a large blue chip like Airbus or Boeing or Lockheed. So you know that the survival of your job and the survival of the company depends on executing. It's a choice, and we're there by choice. That brings a certain level of optimism and positive morale in its own right. Nobody's coming into work saying, "Why the hell I'm here? I don't like my job." Just coming in and having that sense of collective energy is encouraging.
                                                      
The second part is, is I do sense a strong sense of collective belief in the mission. When I say that, it's not necessarily just Windrunner, it's this idea that we as Radia actually have an honest opportunity to impact sustainable energy in a meaningful way. If Windrunner is the key to unlock larger onshore turbine blades, which can reduce the cost of energy by 30%, and it literally doubles the land area in which you can install productive wind energy. Which by the way is what we need if you believe in a carbon-neutral future by 2050.

We as Radia actually have an honest opportunity to impact sustainable energy in a meaningful way. If Windrunner is the key to unlock larger onshore turbine blades, which can reduce the cost of energy by 30%, and it literally doubles the land area in which you can install productive wind energy.

A lot of companies out there have aspired to and even committed in their goals to achieving carbon-neutral by 2050. I sense as a collective team at Radia, we feel motivated by the opportunity. Then you add the gravy, which is kind of more recent as we've really started to understand the need and the interest. If you add for gravy that, hey, by doing this you also can really provide some real stopgap opportunity for strategic airlift and help our national defense or the national defense of other countries. That's compelling.

Devin Liddell:                                         
I love it. And from an external standpoint, I'd add in there, inspiring. Because it's actually come up a couple times on the Design This Day podcast, this sort of some sense that maybe we've lost our capacity to design and build really big things, like to really breathe in the audacity that's required to do these things. But that's exactly what you're doing, that exactly what Radia is doing with Windrunner, is doing something that, as I said earlier, is a lot of people would look at and say, that is just too much and you're doing it. So I would add an inspiring to it.

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
Yeah, thank you. I agree.

Devin Liddell:                                         
All right, I want to make sure we save time for the lightning round. I'm curious if you have a take on technology that you feel is a little overhyped, the most overhyped technology presently?

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
This is hard for me because I'm an advocate and I'm voting for the archers and the Joby's of the world. I really want them to be successful. But I do think this whole urban mobility I think is way overhyped. It still is a little bit. I think you're starting to see that. A lot of those companies that I mentioned before, they're already starting to close or consolidate.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Is it your sense that eVTOLs as a machine, as an application that their ultimate utility will really be around the electrification of short haul air routes?

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
I do think the next big tranche of organic growth is going to be into the regional air transport market. So from local city pairs, where you can actually do a meaningful 300, 500, 900 miles. There is a lot of, in my mind, very credible arguments around the safety of those vehicles relative to say, helicopters. So I do think there are applications today where you see helicopters operating that will be taken over by eVTOLs.
                                                      
My only point was, to be very clear, because I want to be fair to my friends over at Archer for example, I struggle understanding how you're going to get the cost per ticket. The person, no kidding, is going to be flying on one of these things. That the cost that I need to put my butt in that seat to fly on it, how they're going to get it down to a point where it competes with rideshare applications or gets into a realm where the average person can use it on a semi-regular basis. And the only way you get down that cost curse is through massive proliferation. I don't know how that happens in some sort of reasonable timeframe.

Devin Liddell:                                         
And that's a totally fair critique and I share that critique. All right. What about shifting to the other side of the spectrum though? What's your take on the most underhyped technology?

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
I was talking with my team just the other day and I asked this question. One of my guys, his name is Lucas Fortuna, he had a great answer, but he said math. I don't know that that technically aligns with the idea of a technology, but I really like the philosophy of the response in that all technology is enabled by math and it gets the short shrift often.

Devin Liddell:                                         
Right. I love it. That's fantastic. What's an innovation in another industry that has inspired you to think differently about the work you're doing?

Bruno Bachinger:                                       
I think it's hard to say anything other than AI at this point. AI seems to be just, it's pervasive. Just to give an example, I'm an avid photographer as my hobby off to the side whenever I have free time, and the evolution on how you process imagery in the last five years has just changed fundamentally. There's the whole idea of computational photography where it's not what you actually saw, it's some interpretation that the computer helps you generate. So all very interesting, phenomenally powerful, but for me, also phenomenally scary.
                                                      
While I think it has phenomenal, massive potential for productivity and new insights and all the promises, I also see lots of caution in terms of what the data means and how we understand what the data means. At some base level, AI is still fundamentally based on statistical relationships.And that's all extremely powerful, that's awesome, especially if you're trying to understand data. The risk though is that whatever biases exist in your underlying training data set likely exist in whatever the models are telling you. For me personally, I have concerns about what sort of unknown biases are we promulgating in our models that we just don't even know about that are inherent to the underlying data that we're using to train all these models. But over the last 20 years, I've seen this really interesting and power shift away from deterministic analysis to probabilistic analysis.
                                                      
And what I mean by that is, instead of saying when you're doing an engineering design and you're using some sort of analytical means to make a prediction, you say, "The answer is this." In many cases, we no longer say that. We say that, "I'm 70% confident that the answer is going to be this." Or if you want a higher confidence number, the number is this. So the philosophy and the decision-making power that comes with that slight reframe, it's extremely powerful for understanding risk inherent to design. So this coupling of uncertainty with risk and sort of optionality in our decision-making in my mind has been one of the more powerful steps and progressions of engineering as a discipline that I find extremely powerful. It's kind of one of my fundamental bedrocks in terms of how I try to make decisions as an engineering leader.

Devin Liddell:                                         
That's it for today. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, we'd love to hear from you. Visit us at teague.com or send us an email at hello@teague.com.