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Scooting around insta and this popped up on my feed.
Like the design, seems it only flies 20ft off the water..
The future, or just a tired old design nicked off the Russians..
20ft, that bigger than all the waves?
Ekranoplan, so the second one.
Ekranoplans
Great over wide expanses of flat water. Otherwise ...
Do not google Caspian Sea Monster.
Your head might explode
There is nothing new or mysterious about ground effect vehicles. Various nations and companies have been messing about with ground effect vehicles for many years. The Germans before the Russians. They've been around so long that if they were the future of flight then they would already be the present of flight....but they're not. Interesting curiosities of the aerospace industry, like gyrocopters, but of limited practical use.
There is nothing new or mysterious about ground effect vehicles.
They've also appeared on many threads on here, which the OP has been on!
Such as, the geekery that is https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/bbc-cold-war-series/
Why aren't the propellers going round?
[i]sweepy wrote:[/i]
Why aren’t the propellers going round?
Let me explain to you the difference between pictures and videos...
Link to the website - looks fun and acknowledges Russian and German history
Ha Ha! But that must be a hell of a fast camera, they aren't even blurred.
The techique works for sea birds and the Albatros can pull it off over some serious Southern Ocean waves. That being said, no it’s not the future of aviation
sweepy Member
Ha Ha! But that must be a hell of a fast camera, they aren’t even blurred.
Not so much, even my old digital camera on automatic settings could generally get propellers to look almost static with very little blur:
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It’s even better when the frame rate of a video matches the the speed of the rotors...
I posted it because it looks like a new company building these, and it has similarities to the Russian designs.. I just wondered if this was a new theory in short haul plane design and whether it would take off.. 🤷♂️
The techique works for sea birds and the Albatros can pull it off over some serious Southern Ocean waves. That being said, no it’s not the future of aviation
Don't confuse ground effect with dynamic soaring. That is quite different kettle of fish, and is why RC model gliders fly continuous laps at over 500mph.
It’s not going anywhere without a treadmill..
Also, I see conflict with shipping and recreational boats...
Not really, planes want to fly at high altitude, not low altitudes. If you go on a 45 minute domestic flight and you still get upto high 20k ft and into 30k ft altitude where the air is thinner so you drastically reduce drag and hence fuel consumption. There is no reason why you'd want to fly at 20 ft above the surface - it's not efficient, so operationally not viable - if nobody can make a ground effect vehicle service pay then it isn't going to happen, also it's more dangerous and susceptible to weather, birds and other wildlife, slow, noisy, and extremely limited to where they can operate i.e. over water or very flat ground. So not much going for it really. Over water fast ferry's and hydroplanes are better and over land high speed trains are better. All technology has to win it's place on its own merits, and ground effect vehicles just don't. If they did they'd already be out there.
The future for flight are super efficient aircraft, featuring greater electrification still flying at the upper edge of the Troposphere and lower Stratosphere, and maybe low earth orbit vehicles. So more evolution of current technologies. Nothing ground breaking or vastly different within our lifetimes, I'm afraid.
when everything is electric it maybe an advantage being close to the ground
If everything was electric you would fly even higher to minimise drag
when everything is electric it maybe an advantage being close to the ground
To keep it plugged in?
To keep it plugged in?
Wireless charging innit
Hopefully the future of plane design features vertical take off and landing. It'll be easier with electric motors, but the maths just doesn't seem to work out with aircraft. Optimistic calcs suggest we're only 1/3 of the energy capacity needed.
To be really efficient, you could have a lighter than air module like a big airship that lifted your solar powered plane up to the stratosphere with minimal energy usage, then dropped it where it would fly off at high speeds, and the airship would descent back to base. That would save loads I reckon.
Hopefully the future of plane design features vertical take off and landing.
Why? I can't think of very few reasons why this would be prefereable.
I think we're a way off fully electric aircraft - battery energy density is really really crap and will be for decades and might never ever become good enough for anything, but short range, small aircraft. It's more likely to be a hybrid system where the gas turbine engine no longer generates thrust and just generates electrical power for electric motors powering fans with batteries to provide short term power boosts for take off and climb phases of flight - a sort of big APU. The benefit of having the gas turbine element not producing thrust is that you can just run it at its most efficient speed rather than changing the speed of the engine to generate different thrust levels. All fossil fuelled engines only have one sweet spot for max efficiency and you ideally want the machine to sit at that sweet spot all the time regardless of speed. So you can get good efficiency gains from not having the jet engine generating thrust.
look up the Airbus/Siemens/Rolls-Royce E-Fan X technology demonstrator. Something like this is a more viable option within our lifetimes, and will probably be the power system adopted for the next but one generation of aircraft - so circa 2050 ish maybe.