Hey JayUtah checkout WIG(Russian Ekranoplans)

[altair4]

I thought this would get your attention!!

checkout WIG (Russian Ekranoplan) interesting, Wingin Ground Effect

I am sure there will be a market for this in the future(commercial/military)

time will tell!!

[JayUtah]

Yep, ground-effect aircraft have always been a fun niche in aircraft engineering. They have their strengths, but also their weaknesses. So where the strengths win and the weaknesses don't matter, there will likely be commercial develoment.

[Al Johnston]

The BBC showed a documentary about it a few years back: The Caspian Sea Monster. The programme mentioned that efforts were being made to market smaller ekranoplans in the US, but I've not heard anything of it since...

[JayUtah]

The problem is that the aerodynamic effects don't scale down well. A small ground-effect aircraft reaps proportionally little reward in efficiency, but has all the handling problems and speed limitations of the larger airframe. So at that scale it doesn't have any commercial advantage.

The only commercially successful ground-effect aircraft would be one that is very large. And large aircraft are expensive to engineer and expensive to buy. Few aerospace companies today are willing to invest in a large novelty airframe. Because GE aircraft fly slower than high-altitude aircraft, they aren't attractive as passenger aircraft.

[Al Johnston]

I think the idea was to compete with boats and ferries, over which they'd have a pronounced speed advantage while not having quite the fuel penalty of something like a hovercraft.

[gwiz]

A big problem with an aircraft flying at very low altitude is the number of things it can hit. Large birds can cause significant damage to an aircraft, and you need a pretty good radar to pick out a small boat in time to avoid clipping its mast. Over land you have even more possibilities, from party balloons to power lines.

[JayUtah]

I can see it capturing some of the hovercraft and hydroplane markets, but GE vehicles require significant runway to get up to speed and then to slow down again. Short-hop ferries will still hold that market, such as in Puget Sound.

I rode the straits of Messina many times. You can ride a slow ferry with a displacement hull or an aliscafo (hydroplane) that ends up being pretty hard on the dental work. It's not at all a smooth ride, no matter what the videos show. Unfortunately the strait of Messina is probably too narrow for an ekranoplan to get up to speed and get airborne for long enough to make a difference.