This is great. Someone else go first though.
If one could go at speed along a 300-foot-wide river, we could have super-fast travel from the Bay to Sacramento!
1: Ok, I'll do it!
This does make me a little nervous --
It only flies at 10 m, so a bad wind gust can put it in the water at 180 mph. That limits the weather it can fly in, and could be a risk even on calm days.
And how can a person trust anything that Peter Thiel is involved with?
Pretend your life is as valuable as the privacy of Hulk Hogan's sex life and racism.
They called them by the ugly term "ekranoplans" .... a much nicer-sounding name - a seaglider
What heresy is this?
All airports are full, so this can service lots more places than short-range planes can.
As long as they're on flat bodies of water. Also, I'm not sure how full ekranoplan ports are.
I wonder if Lake Ontario is calm enough for good ekranoplanery. It'd make getting from Toronto to lots of NYS quicker.
What would be the most appropriate US ekranoplan port for Lake Ontario? Rochester is bigger, but Oswego is closer to New York.
I think Oswego makes more sense. You could even keep going in the ekranoplan up the river system to get to the Erie Canal.
Then you could get on a really skinny one.
*cough* we already dealt with this. ekranoplans are the patriarchy, the future is the hoverqueer revival: https://twitter.com/yorksranter/status/1315929527789457408
The village of Akutan in the Aleutians used to use a hovercraft to bring people in from the airport, which is on a different island. It was so expensive to operate, though, that after a few years they gave up and switched to a helicopter. (There's actually a whole complicated backstory involving a completely different village and a wildlife refuge.)
honestly, they were right. it's time to ram a stake through the ekranomyth and maybe even hoverqueer and ascend into full-on rotary perversion. my dad was a fixed-wing chauvinist so maybe that's what I've been reacting against.
They definitely did save money by switching to the helicopter. Which is kind of astounding.
As the linked article notes, the long term plan was to build a dock so they could use a regular boat. I don't know if that ever happened.
This says they applied for a RAISE grant in 2021 to build the dock. I looked for awardees of that grant and found in this map tool nothing for Akutan, but at the neighboring Unalaska the "Qawalangin Tribe Port Infrastructure Improvement Project". Here's a press release for it. Could that be the same thing incorrectly placed? Here's a press release. Maybe Unalaska, being three times the population, had a better application.
Could that be the same thing incorrectly placed?
No, Qawalangin is the local tribe in Unalaska so that must be a different project there. The Akutan tribe is the Native Village of Akutan, but the applying entity in this case would seem to be the Aleutians East Borough. It looks like they just applied for the RAISE grant but didn't get it.
The reason they can afford to do all this stuff with hovercrafts and helicopters, btw, is that the Trident cannery in Akutan is the biggest in the world and the borough makes a fortune in fish taxes from it. It's a tough logistical situation but they're in better shape than a lot of places in rural Alaska.
Interisland here is supposed to be one of the use cases, but wind and waves in the channels are non-trivial. Curious to see how that goes.
Ekranoplanery
rotation axis
Trident cannery
fishing taxes
my dad was a fixed-wing chauvinist so maybe that's what I've been reacting against.
I'm dying.
I'm skeptical. Most fish can't even read a tax form.
my dad was a fixed-wing chauvinist
I don't get the new Haggadah.
10 is admirable trolling when the only great, glorious and correct opinion is that both ekranoplans and hovercraft are excellent.
But it does make me wonder about the spread of the social media ekranoplan craze. Did it start here? How did ekranoplans become an unfogged thing anyway? I am pretty sure that I knew about them pre-unfogged, but certainly a good 30% of my ekranoplan conversations now happen here.
They called them by the ugly term "ekranoplans" .... a much nicer-sounding name - a seaglider
What shall we call this thing that isn't in the sea and isn't a glider?
A seaglider!
(Reminds me of a mildly comic SF novel I read in which one character fought a doomed pedantic battle against everyone else referring to the enemy's one-person aircraft as "jetbikes" when they were neither bicycles nor jet-powered)
How did ekranoplans become an unfogged thing anyway?
I'm pretty sure it's because they're palindromes.
I think the ekranoplan craze might have been Charlie Stross? Anyway the original development here seems to be combining an ekky with a hydrofoil, which is a truly impressive level of commitment to the kind of stagnation era Soviet technology that happened because they had all this oil they didn't know what to do with.
Twist - looking for information on one of the big Soviet hydrofoils (designed by the same guy who gave you the ekky!) I notice that the Wikipedia page is available in Russian, Portuguese, and Hungarian only. I love the mixture of commitment and odd priorities there.
The hydrofoil idea seems like a great way to overcome the unstick problem that flying boats and conventional ekranoplans face - you need a lot more power to take off than you do to stay airborne, so, for example, the KM had IIRC eight engines and turned six of them off once it was cruising. I suspect that getting up to planing speed and then lifting off might be an easier unstick.
If the Russians had a small fleet of Lun class ekranoplans they would have been able to take Odessa
31: they might actually be pretty useful in a cross-Strait operation - far faster than shipping, too fast for ASMs and too low for SAMs, and can go straight over those pre-registered and mined beaches and the marshes behind them and belly-land in LZs well inland.
so a bit like a really, really big helicopter?